Profiling Day Job

[J B Bell]

I, too, am unemployed.  Not only that, I collect Employment Insurance, which is slightly different from (and less stigmatized than) welfare.  Tomorrow I'll be applying to study for a four-year Practitioner diploma in Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Before that, I worked too many years in various IT jobs, mostly at ISPs, and before that, retail and temping.  Most recently I was a "Senior Network Administrator (UNIX)" on paper, while actually being "the guy who makes the other admin's lives easier by writing scripts like crazy."  So really I'm a sysadmin who did more programming than most sysadmins, or a programmer with a dangerous amount of sysadminning power.  :)

I'm system-obsessed, and adore elegance, yet I'm lazy, so I'll often settle for a useable hack.  I think in very broad strokes that then need to be made more precise, usually with help from other people.  I have what I call a "networked brain"--I think poorly when I'm isolated.  I think it's totally silly to talk about "what effect my job has on gaming", or vice-versa; in typical psychological terms, other parts of my life have impacted my attitude toward gaming, writing, and interpreting reality far more than what I do for a living.  I'd rather work in the other direction and say what my gaming looks like and trace in the other direction.

My games, as GM, focus strongly on the subjectivity of personal experience, and the salvific potential of ordinary human relations.  It's pretty hard not to attribute that to living with a family member who had schizophrenia for several years.  I also love to work with the subtle weirdnesses inherent in using symbolic communication when symbols seem to have their own agendas, and on a more ordinary level, my focus on heresy comes back into gaming from studying Gnosticism rather obsessively for a few years while trying to Figure It All Out.  Being thoroughly convinced there's no such thing as any actual, sustaining personal self, Author Stance and Director Stance come rather naturally to me.  At some point I'd love to play or write a game where the "focus of agency"--basically, in a game, what level of existence you decide counts as a "character" from the WTO down to different sub-systems of the brain a la  Society of Mind and Dennett's work--is far more flexible.

Oh, yeah, and being unemployed gives me lots of time to obsess about gaming.  Alas, I still get face-to-face fixes fairly infrequently.

--JB

Edit:  Oh, and I am looking for a position in a technical college in Vancouver as an instructor.  So if anybody knows anybody who knows anybody, do drop me a line.  :)

[Fabrice G.]

Well,

I'm a long time student...
Having done biology in highscool...
Three years in History in college (what's your name for that diploma ?)
Actually passing a third years in educational engeniring, and I plan to do a MD.

All these studies have had a huge impact on my games. I can't keep myself from using what I've learned durin my gaming. Not obviously, but with some kind of subtlety. frex: I had to play some medieval game with my friend to show them how different things were from modern stereotypes...or the base I get in psychology helped me to anderstand GNS and keep my distance from it at the same time, etc.

I think that basically it gave me some culture, wanting to use the knowledge in my game to make them better.

Not being too pompous, i hope.

Fabrice.

[Fabrice G.]

Well,

I'm a long time student...
Having done biology in highscool...
Three years in History in college (what's your name for that diploma ?)
Actually passing a third years in educational engeniring, and I plan to do a MD.

All these studies have had a huge impact on my games. I can't keep myself from using what I've learned durin my gaming. Not obviously, but with some kind of subtlety. frex: I had to play some medieval game with my friend to show them how different things were from modern stereotypes...or the base I get in psychology helped me to understand GNS and keep my distance from it at the same time, etc.

I think that basically it gave me some culture, wanting to use the knowledge in my game to make them better.

Not being too pompous, i hope.

Fabrice.

[Bailey]

I do the chef thing.

It doesn't affect my gaming much, except my old gaming group expected me to make the snacks.

[Walt Freitag]

For most of the 90s I was a full-time freelance computer game designer, and making my living at it (no trust funds or disability or other back-door income). I still pretend to be one, but now I program as well as design, and mostly educational science simulations (things like exploring the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, or running a Southern Blot in a simulated wet lab) rather than games.

How does this affect my gaming? Heck, it is my gaming, or indistinguishable from it. Simplify and clarify on the surface, incorporate the hidden nuances that lead to unexpected depth, and search for the perfect mechanism to get the point across.

- Walt

[gentrification]

I do miscellaneous web maintenance and troubleshooting for the online presence of a publisher of scientific journals, specifically, the American Journal of Physiology.

Sadly, it relates to my gaming only insofar as I often do prepwork for my games during free time (and not-as-free time) at the office.