blakerson.com

I told Facebook (ie, my friends and loved ones) about a week or so ago, but I've more or less known I'd go for a while longer than that. It was really just a matter of reaching a particular level of certainty that crazy random twists wouldn't happen at the last minute.

I guess they still could happen, but at this point I'm OK with stopping the job search and turning down whatever leftover job search calls that trickle in. (Why do I care about this? About 48 hours before my first departure to Japan, back in '07, Google called completely out of the blue. Making that decision was agonizing and sleep-depriving.)

So, for the handful of readers who haven't already been exposed to the news somehow, I'm headed to Rakuten, Japan's #1 in e-commerce. (That's pronounced 'rock-ten.') I'll start in April 2012, so I'll be moving at the end of March. 

Honestly? I don't know. They'll assign me after a month of training. Could be their core e-commerce business, or it could be new lines of business (like Travel, Golf or Weddings!), or it could be international rollouts of existing products (how about Edy for your NFC money needs?), or it could be assisting in international acquisitions (which have happened so far in the US, UK, France, Russia and China by joint venture). They're a big company but still have room to grow at 7,000 employees (for comparison, Amazon has 43,000).

You mean about radiation? Not so much. I'm more nervous about leaving loved ones very far behind here in the US.

Hell yes! A UT alum already working for the company was cool enough to reach out to me and tell me all about his experience. Seems like he's having a great time. When I was living and teaching in the boonies, I came to Tokyo to recharge my batteries. Now I'll live there.

Tokyo housing isn't as bad as you may have been led to believe. I've found apartments online for about $1,000 a month in rent in awesome locations. Small, sure, but definitely not shoebox-sized. It'll be less if I let Rakuten set me up with housing. The company is located on the southern edge of central Tokyo, in Shinagawa. That's a major bullet train stop and is just around the corner from Haneda Airport, the swanky city one that just started taking international flights. I'll live somewhere roughly 30 minutes from Shinagawa. If I'm lucky it'll be in another big neighborhood such as Naka-meguro. Otherwise I'll just be a teeny-tiny bit closer to Yokohama: convenient to work but a little further from all the fun action.

For other money matters, Rakuten has free breakfast and lunch and pays for my commuting. I just need to pay for suits to wear!

I'm headed home to Texas to enjoy the winter at home, rent-free, with Mom. I'm going to miss California a lot but it'll be a good place for 4 months' downtime before things get crazy. Oh, also, I'm looking for an honest 4 months' work in Texas! So, uh, bring me in as a temp or something!

I'll be home before Thanksgiving! 

It was a symptom, and now I've finally figured out the root cause.

It came on suddenly. Namely, when I woke up last week and realized that I had a ton of friends going into the social games business.

And I think it's a sign that we really will have an economic recovery (at least a small one, for now) when everybody who is employed yells "My company is hiring!" on Facebook.

That scared me. I have 8 months to go until graduation. I discovered at GDC Austin that the companies I'm interested in aren't themselves interested in talking to someone that far in advance. The games business moves fast, and the social games business moves even faster. "Five months is forever," said an industry veteran who just made the transition from core to social gaming. Another one (from a major publisher) said to my face, "We need product managers right now, and we're starting them at $75,000. You'd be a great match." That *awesome* job that's open now? Won't be next June, nor may any of the jobs like it.

I took this concern to several of my professors. Without missing a beat, they pushed right back. "Take leave," they said.

I'm not dumb: this is tantamount to dropping out. Who abandons their dream job to overpay for the privilege to walk the stage? I could walk away from the extra $15,000 in debt right now and start working my way through the gaming world I so clearly belong in. And this whole get a job / get your foot in the door thing is why you enter a professional grad school. So why do the last third of school if the Prime Directive has already been satisfied?

There are plenty of reasons not to go this route. Mainly, job security in the games business is nonexistent, so I could easily end up unemployed, degree-less and in debt in a matter of months. What's more, life in San Diego is really rather good. Why the rush to run away from here?

The symptom manifested itself as the temptation to drop out and get going. What actually happened is that I figured out what I want to do.

I didn't have the answer to that basic question after high school, or college, or my time in Japan. Now I have that answer, and for a while, finishing grad school became just an expensive obstacle on the way to that objective. I didn't give grad school its due credit for helping me get the skills and internship time I needed to figure that out. 

I also forgot the biggest lesson my mom taught me: why be excited about work? We'll all be doing a hell of a lot of it in the future. 

So in the end, I've calmed back down, stayed enrolled for the winter quarter, and made sure to attend my last surfing class this weekend. In the meantime, it's nice to know who I am, and it won't be long before I'm always introducing myself like this:

"Hi. I'm Blake, and I make video games."

If you can believe it, I was laid off from a summer internship. My colleague (and fellow Austinite) Will Leverett wrote up the situation, and I think most of us would agree with his assessment. The product was seriously flawed, and the transatlantic offices were almost inevitably suspicious of one another, but by and large, we all liked the people we directly worked with.  

The last days at the office, after the layoff bomb had been dropped, were somewhat cathartic. People had stressed for weeks or months over the future of their jobs. But now, at least, they knew the deal, and could move forward. Spirits were surprisingly raised. Former employees back in Colorado are still meeting up for margaritas at lunch and spending afternoons on LinkedIn collecting contacts and recommendations.

I, for one, was able to come back to California, a place I missed more than I thought. During my eight weeks in Boulder, I learned that I took a hell of a lot of things for granted here, including the weather, the location, the local culture, a whole lot of food, and the people. The California atmosphere in general, if you will. Boulder's a beautiful place - and I should take a second to thank my generous Colorado hosts - but I felt in my heart that I wouldn't be happy there long-term. The drive across western Colorado, however, finally sold me on the state, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can spend Christmas snowboarding in Vail. 

I've been back for five days now, and it just feels right. I've gotten to go running at the park, I've laid by the pool, I've slept in my own bed, cooked in my own kitchen, seen a few awesome people, gone out in LA's Little Tokyo, and of course, eaten at Tajima. Things here are just as I've made them over the last year, and that's intensely satisfying. 

You may notice I don't sound too distressed about losing my job. I'm not. For an internship, I did what I came to do: get in the door and establish some solid contacts. Financially, it's not too much worse to be unemployed. I was paid decently in Colorado, but I was paying rent at two places and eating out every day, so I may as well be dipping into savings from a beach here. Emotionally, there's no pain at all. It's just not the kind of thing I would take personally. That's a necessary attitude for the games industry, given how entrepreneurial it is. 

I had a quick talk with my boss on the way out of town. He asked if, after this experience, I'd stay in the games industry. My answer: "Hell yes."

This is it.

I'm working on All Points Bulletin, which is basically Grand Theft Auto Online. If you're reading on my proper website, here's a YouTube video with some promo stuff on it:

I'm doing some business-y stuff, some data manipulation, some economic analysis, and even a touch of finance. If I were working full-time, my job description would look like this.

So this means that I'll be in Boulder, CO, for the summer. I was a little hesitant at first, considering it's not the west coast, but I've been convinced to be psyched for it for several reasons:

-Nice weather

-Everyone's outdoorsy and eats well and is, not surprisingly, gorgeous. I need to get into this culture and try to do the same. I'm pudgy. :3

-Mom spent her 20s in this area and considers it the prime of her life.

-It's looking like I'll be living with family friends as a boarder. I'm starting to like this idea. I could use the presence of some good people, and a house, and dogs. The sensation of family is one I very rarely get, and I don't mind getting a dose of it this summer.

I'm really, really psyched to be in the industry in a respectable, serious position. 

And by the way - I have this job thanks to the one and only Nick Sivo. So Nick, I owe you like 20 beers. There are other people who deserve huge thanks as well, but the ball never would've been rolling if Nick hadn't thought of me when his VC partner needed a gamer. You've just jump-started my career, dude. <3

I've been putting this one off for a long time. But now that my summer job search is over I can breathe a little easier and share one of my favorite moments in the search: an invitation to the Blizzard campus. Not that I'll be working at Blizz this summer, but I'll explain myself in the post right after this one.

(If you don't know: Blizzard makes World of Warcraft. That's all the background you get. If you're not on board, this train's leaving the station without you because we're headed to Awesome Town and it's an express.)

Even if you are in the know, consider this: WoW has made Blizz rich. Dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking rich. It's changed the way they think and do things. It's spread wealth around the company. It's shifted the balance of power in the office politics. It's affected their game design and their corporate culture way more than a merger with Activision has.

These things become evident from the minute you get past the huge Hollywood-esque gate that looks like it's serious about protecting something. Everyone gets free valet parking. This is less of a "we don't want you wasting time on such plebian things" perk than a matter of necessity. Their parking lot is so overcrowded that they have to have professionals whose job it is to park cars as physically close together as possible. Cars are double- and triple-stacked everywhere you look.

Except for the front, by the entrances to the three buildings on campus. A few top execs park their exotics in the spiffy spots, and there's one spot with a special sign:

"Reserved for /loot winner"

I wasn't kidding about WoW affecting the culture around here.

So my meeting was with a pair of recruiters over lunch. Like a lot of top-notch companies, they had a lovely cafeteria that served a great club sandwich. I nervously chatted about school and what I hoped to do, what games I played, and so on, and my two recruiters quickly let on that they don't just require talent at Blizzard. They require fanboys. This wasn't me. One recruiter took a break from the conversation to make a quick phone call. In hushed tones, I heard talk of a "WoW box," but I strained to make conversation with the other recruiter while that was going on anyway. 

Afterward, I was given a tour of one of the office buildings. There are three: one for the WoW team, one for everything else (Warcraft, StarCraft and their top-secret stuff) and one more for support facilities such as IT, the cafeteria, and the gym. I got a walkthrough of the WoW building.

These are some truly great offices. The mood lighting is fantastic, couches abound, it's extremely well-designed, everyone's in a comfy environment, and every developer I was introduced to had the exact same thing to say: "This is the last job you'll ever have." As my guide (their amazingly awesome and generous senior recruiter, who I'll sing the praises of more later) walked me out of the UI department, one of them yelled, "Can you bring some more Kool-Aid?" Buncha jokers, those UI guys. In all seriousness, very few people ever leave Blizzard, which makes their recruiting process very strenuous since they only get one shot to fill a job.

I even had the chance to meet the producer of WoW. The guy got pretty high praise from others inside the company, and right from the handshake he had a different vibe from everyone else in the company. While I had mostly met with laid-back developers lazily working on a quiet day in the office, this guy J. was business. He was very nice, but certainly intense. His time was not to be wasted. And yet, with a prod from my wonderful guide, he offered some advice to an aspiring producer: "Let yourself be pigeonholed into what it is you want to do."

That may have been the best part of that visit. That message - persist in what it is you want to do - is as much a part of the game creation culture as rags-to-riches story are part of the American cultural heritage. But to hear it that one time, from a man so respected and in a position so admired, was reaffirming beyond words. The way he phrased it made it much less a case of "You've gotta fight to get to where you want" than a case of "The tides will knock you around; let them guide you into the place you want to be." The idea is hard to get across at 1am. But it's gaming Zen, I promise.

And then my tour really was over and I was sent back to the valet stand. "Oh, wait!" my recruiter exclaimed. "Do you have a minute?" she asked. 

Of course I did.

I followed her back into the WoW building, but this time didn't follow her behind closed doors. I waited at the reception desk for what must have been 15 minutes. Finally, she came back out with a Blizz goodie bag. Inside was the usual stuff you get at industry events - t-shirt, hat, that kind of thing.

But this bag was much heavier. Also inside was a copy of WoW, the first expansion, strategy guides for each, and a one-year subscription. That phone call that had been made over lunch was for my sake.

"If you want to work for us?" started the recruiter, pointing to the game. "Get cracking."

-----------------------------------------------

As a post-script to this story, I kept in touch with the recruiter. It was obvious that I wasn't a "culture fit" for Blizz, in HR-speak, but she was more than happy to set me up with her corporate cousins at Activision. I gave her my mailing address, and in March arrived my very own pass to GDC. It was my first time for that conference, and it was a blast.