Jam

The second morning of the game jam
hosted in a co-op office space,
I arrive with cup full of four-shot americano
and a full night of bad dreams back home.
There are students asleep on couches, others with the haunted droop of those
who haven’t slept, working
through caffeine gone numb.
One loud voice says “Sleep is always optional.”
These are students in a college for game design.
(I’m worried what we are teaching.)
A game jam is not like when musicians jam
with friends in some garage, when I unpack
my saxophone, keys arpeggiating, when we tool
about our instruments in open exploration,
arriving at a song is not the point. We are there to play. But a game jam’s point is to complete a work.
Now the students brag records of sleep deprivation. Forty hours. That’s nothing! Forty seven.
The game jam’s theme is mental health. The irony goes unnoted. As a recovering workaholic, I am disturbed.
The burnout rate for game designers is three to five years. I’m in my fourth and feel the burning at my edges.
In the industry we call it crunch:
Overtime we volunteer from passion for our work. Crunch. We throw our bodies in the maw of our machines. Crunch. Our fleshy lives fuel our engines onward. Crunch. We mythologize the heroes of the past...

One designer had a sawhorse
for a chair dubbed The Throne of Pain
where he sat to stay awake and work,
make the best game he could.
And the game was good. Bad news for us all.
These are the stories students hear.
For them the jam is microcosm,
their studies a competition.
Those who survive have the passions they need
to live their dreams, to make video games!
(What if I told them game design is another office job?)
Despite the rising noise, some jammers haven’t stirred.
“He’s not moving, do you think he’s dead?” One student jokes.
But with the stress of a game jam on top of school,
the words are too close to the truth he may be dead.
I recall: my heartbeat irregular in my longest weeks of work.
I recall: one more task became two, fighting hydras into the night.
and I recall: my breathing—shallow, pneumonic, flooding—slow.
But these memories all are flat. Scentless. Dull.
They happened to someone else and he died.
I have a photo from the end of his longest crunch.
His hair is grown out a mess. He looks ill
and the illness makes him look young. A skeletal child.
I remember he saw a doctor and was shocked when she said
“You’re fine. There’s nothing wrong. You’re fine.”
The second morning of the jam
and students are dying to make games.

The Call to Clown

No one chooses to be a clown.
This is not to say you do not
enroll in a clown school
and register to clown.
You are not drafted or kidnapped
with tape-gag and black-bag
into a car what seems too small
to hold so many clowns.
Nor that you, as kidnappee, will
find hood removed amid
circus act, an unvolunteer
for the human cannonball pact.
No. When I say no one
chooses to be a clown
there is, importantly
one choice for you to make.
You may be in the midday slump
of office busywork
questioning the fifth cup
of coffee and whether
your coworkers note how
frequent your trips to the washroom.
You may be in the evening slump
of homebound traffic jams
remembering your car
is, in fact, visible
to the drivers who
saw you pick that snot from your nose.
You may be in the morning slump of bustling restaurants
wondering if waitstaff
forgot your bill—and you
along with it. You check
the time. Almost two hours now.
In one such small embarrassment new thoughts will arrive dark and strange: "Perhaps I should go to clown school." "Clown school may be a home at last." That these thoughts occur at all means you are already on the path.
"Perhaps I am a clown."
And you already are.
This is what I mean when I say
no one chooses to be a clown. You discover a clown is what you are and the choice is what you will do.

Andrew Yoder is a designer from rural Oregon working in Canada to make video games (as one does)