Coping with post-partum depression in the gaming industry

You’re building up a show that you’ll never see. There is a lot of grinding and anticipation that ends not by some blinding flash of light, but by simply running out of things to do. It’s kind of hollow. What now? Your baby has been born, filled with your hopes and molded with the creaks in your back, and has left to fulfill that which you have taught it but you will never know what it did.

Shipping a game is a strange feeling. On the one hand, you build up and up and up to the moment of perfection. And just as you achieve that moment of perfection, where the development effort crescendos, it disappears out of your life forever. No amount of ship parties will cover the hollow feeling that your child is gone, has left not with brilliant flash of light, but quietly in the middle of the night. Sure, you may get postcards back every now and then… You may even know what kinds of grades the child is getting in college. But the fact remains, your baby is no longer your baby. Your baby belongs to everyone else in the world but you. Your baby is gone to strike it’s fortune, taking all of your hopes and dreams with it and leaving you an empty shell to be filled up again.

While working at one am just days earlier you had craved the moment it would be out the door, now your idle hands cry back at you, begging to be used. You fill the hours by “testing” out the games you had missed… The latest console adventure game from Nintendo. The most recent mindless driving smash-em-up. That movie-licensed Star Wars game that this time won’t be terrible. You start brainstorming ideas for ways to improve the game, even though you don’t have the publisher’s approval for a sequal yet. What do you do with yourself now that the goal you worked so hard for all of these months is complete? To the game developer, the pursuit of perfection is more important than the posession of perfection: We work hard to make games perfect, not to have a perfect game ourselves. What do you do now?

I don’t have an answer to that question. All developers deal with this problem differently. Some write. Some drink. Some dive towards their next project. Once I moved across the country. But I have found that the following steps do help.

1. Don’t just ignore it, do something different. Take a vacation. Take up cooking. Try to fix your car. Anything you can do to wedge some activity between you and your last project is helpful. It may be ackward to suddenly have actual time to fill, but don’t worry: a little like an updated resume website can quickly balloon to a full-time endeavor.
2. Try to put things into perspective: It’s difficult to know what you have done when you’re sweating fine details of a project for months on end. What are other people going to say? How does the game fit into the timeline and progression of gaming in general? What games are going to be better, and why? Questions like this help you to stop thinking in terms of the little details, and start thinking of global issues.
3. Read the reviews, especially the bad ones. Outside perspective can be really helpful, especially in letting go.
4. Grow it. If you’re still emotionally attached to your previous project, stop sweating the tiny implementation details you may have passed up in your rush and start planning ways to make a sequal that is twice as good in the same development timeframe. That way you are lending your energy to a potential next project, not your last one.

Project attachment is an interesting subject, deserving of studies of it’s own. But at some point every developer has got to let things go. You can’t make the next great game if you’re obsessing over your ex.