If you’re offended by the title then please hold your horses and calm down! let us define what a hardcore gamer is before you proceed further into reading this blog post. Hardcore gamer that I am talking about is someone who play video games as a primary hobby and tend to spend large amounts (if not all) of their free time playing games, they are those who would turn on their PC/console to play games as soon as they get back from work or school and would only stop playing after they run out of juice.
I am going to start with the reason why it is so, it is simple really: hardcore gamer do not have any free time left to polish their game development skills.
Some of us became a game developer because of our passion in video games. Undoubtedly this passion comes from playing some really fun and memorable games at some point in our lives, we may have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours playing games and then one day we decided to build a career as a game developer and starts making a game that we really love. There is a transition here, where we transformed from a consumer to a creator.
Being a game developer (creator) is different from being a gamer (consumer), it is a very hard path to travel, no matter if you are a programmer, an artist, a designer, or a producer. We are creating a creative product in a limited time with many technical and financial constraints and the available technology and techniques keeps on changing in a very fast pace. If we still have the mentality of a hardcore gamer then we will most likely unable to catch up with the industry, our skill sets becomes obsolete, our techniques becomes in-efficient, and all we can do is criticizing and commenting other games (just like what a consumer usually do).
You may think that spending lots of hours into gaming will increase your game development skills, you may think that these hours upon hours of gaming experiences that you have acquired will help you in designing, implementing, drawing, and producing your game. Well they are not, even if they are they will be very insignificant.
Rather than playing games like a hardcore gamer, you better of learning, polishing your skills, modding a game or just creating something, we have already spent a lot of time playing games before we became a game developer and adding more hours into it won’t do us good in the long run, it’s inefficient and time consuming and it has a risk of corrupting our mind to become more of a consumer rather than a creator. Nowadays, there are many convenient and effective ways to keep up with the latest trend in gaming without actually playing games: there are youtubers, game reviewers, game wikis, etc. Yes, you lose the actual experience from playing a game, but hell, you have had enough experience before you became a game developer, haven’t you?
I am not saying that we should not play games, on the contrary, we do need to play games from time to time. What I am trying to say is that you should never play them like a hardcore gamer do, in which case you will not have the time to polish your skills.
In time management, there is a rather famous diagram called Eisenhower Matrix that looks something like this:
Quadrant 1 is working on your job at a game studio or working on the game you are currently making (professionally) as an indie game developer, Q1 is important and urgent, you will get fired if you neglect your job, or you won’t be able to pay your bills if you’re not releasing your indie game.
Quadrant 2 is polishing your game development skills or doing something that you know will increase your capability as a game developer, whether it’s reading game development books or articles, watching tutorials, trying to increase your productivity by understanding the tools/engine you are using, implementing or prototyping a concept, modding an existing games, learn math, learn color theory, socializing with other game developers or people in the industry, etc. They are all very important, but they are not urgent.
Quadrant 3 is not important but it is urgent, usually it has a lot of things to do with social obligations such as attending reunion, going online in Facebook / snap-chat / twitter / Instagram only to keep our net presence and ‘existence’, login to an online game because the pressure from your online gaming community who misses you so much while you’re at work, going on a trip with a social circle that you don’t even really care about, joining political debates in the internet (it seems very urgent because you need to correct these imbeciles way of thinking, but you have to admit that it is far from important). Their urgency has no meaning because they are not important, but it is hard to let go because of personal insecurity of being shunned from your social circle. I personality think this quadrant is very toxic if not managed properly, oh and yeah, MMO games are in this quadrant.
Quadrant 4 is hedonism and leisure, it is where you spent your time for non-important things, things in this quadrant usually lift the stress out of your shoulder if you can manage it wisely but it is very dangerous if being done extensively up to the point of addiction; This is where playing games are at.
Eisenhower matrix is a very tools to manage our time, the trick is to just hold on to this princile: “The more important things should not be at the mercy of the less important things”. This will make us ends up spending most of our time doing Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 2. Q1 is the presence, it’s in front of our face and Q2 is for the future, it contains efforts to become better and better at what we are doing.
Quadrant 1 is a no-brainer, we simply have to do it because of our responsibility requires us to do it. For the other three quadrants, we should always focus our effort in Quadrant 2; But most of the time we trade it off by doing Quadrant 3 or 4 because Quadrant 2 lacks the urgency and the leisure, but if you neglect it, it will bites you in the buttocks really hard when there comes a time in which you really need them (which means they shift from Q2 to Q1 because of the urgency), for example, let’s say that you are working as a 2D game artist and you are tasked with drawing and animating several sprites of wolves, and the deadline is in a couple of weeks; If you spent most of your time playing games you would not be able to do it properly even if there are wolves in it (witcher 3 or world of warcraft) and ended up with ugly animations (or even worse, you can’t meet your deadline because you are still learning how to draw a wolf). It would be a different matter if you spent your free time polishing your animation skills and keep on expanding the range of animals that you can draw, even knowing how to draw a lion would really help in understanding the structure of a wolf, you will have something to start working on, you have the base knowledge to do your things, and you will constantly become a better game developer because you keep on polishing your skills as a creator rather than your skills as a consumer.