The Temp & Married Geek’s Night Out

A productive, if uneventful day, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun.

Spent the vast majority of the day laboriously working through my final interview, with a very smart game developer named Jay Wilson who works with Relic, a Canadian games company and one of the better developers in action today. The total interview, when finished, weighed in at seven pages, and it’s all quite insightful. It’s always fun to talk about games and the mechanics and design of them (At least it is for me) but it’s more fun and interesting when you talk to one of the guys that actually does it and he shares with you the nuances of design, little tricks to make things easier or more visual for players which make you stop and wonder how anyone came up with that in the first place.

Also finally got in touch with someone at the Singapore International Film Festival. There’s a temp job in the offing. It would involve me actually going to an office, but it would only run a few months, from January to April. Heck, I don’t have anything pencilled in, and it’s movies, so why not…

In the evening I hung out with some of my co-workers. I guess you’d have to call them that, since GameAxis is my only regular gig, and has been for the last couple of years, so I’ve come to know the editors there very well and we get on famously. They needed me to review a couple of games, so we met up for a quick comic book run (He got the Darren Aranofsky graphic novel The Fountain, I got the latest compilation, book 6, of the amazing Y: The Last Man) and then met up with the other editor for a quick meal and some coffee.

It’s always fun hanging out with fellow geeks.

It’s a bit weird for me, because I’m so used to being the single guy, and now I’m the married one and saying stuff like, “What time is it? Oh geez, it’s getting kind of late, I should be getting back home to the Wife,” and meaning it. I actually want to go home. I want to spend time with the Wife. Fortunately this also means playing Dragon Quest VIII since she is heavily, HEAVILY into it (Which, in a perverse way, does me no end of pride. “Why yes, my Wife is a hardcore RPG gamer, what of it?…”) but to be honest–and perhaps this is simply a newlywed thing–it feels good to go home and just be with her. For years I’d resigned myself to just being a jaded, cynical loaner who was constantly turned down by women for not being rich enough, or prestigious enough, or “marketable” enough in some way, and now here I am with someone that not only tolerates most of my quirks, but actually likes quite a few of them. I am a lucky guy, and I know it.

Speaking of which, there’s more gaming to be done.