It’s actually a slight lie to say that I’m employed again. On paper, and legally, I’m not. I’m a fulltime PhD student. If your PhD is funded through a research council, which mine is, you receive a stipend per month. That stipend’s just enough to live alone with a little bit of money to buy a stupid treat or two, at least living on the edge of Manchester.

In some ways, this puts me in the best of both worlds. I get the discounts and timetable freedom offered by being a student, with the income benefits of a salaried job. Effectively minimum wage, but I used to live in fucking Guildford. I can budget. And now, with my future mostly laid out for me, it’s given me a moment to pause and reflect.

I don’t think enough people talk about how traumatising the job hunt is.

Of course, more than enough people have talked about how much the job hunt sucks; how much time and energy is expended into something with so little return. People do not talk about it enough as being a genuine trauma, of something that permanently rewires your brain to expect one outcome. And to receive that outcome over and over and over and over and over and over. To have the wires run so hot they leave a permanent length of scars through your skull. The wires are dissolved; they aren’t needed anymore. You already know where that application’s going.

When I got the good news, that I was the top applicant for the PhD, my receptors were completely fried. There was the caveat that my lack of a masters meant a case needed to be made to AHRC, yes, but I didn’t even have the capacity to celebrate the victory of making it. I simply could not process that something good had happened to me. 

I barely processed the actual offer. The tangible, actual offer that landed in my inbox as a neatly-formated pdf. The PhD, along with being something I have genuinely wanted to do since I graduated, as long as I actually make progress on the thing, will keep me paid for three years. For those three years, I am “safe”. I have no need to hunt for jobs and do not have to spend hours every day scraping the internet for a silver of money. I have better salary security right now than the vast majority of my friend group.

I simply could not process that.

I’ll be honest, I’m still not quite able to process that. I’m currently sat in a flat I am paying with my own money, staring at the stipend just deposited into my bank account, and I still keep thinking about where to go when this all ends in three years. Outlining plans to leverage everything I can to stick into Salford and NWCDTP’s research faculty like a thorn. Escape strategies if this all goes up in flames in a month. I keep thinking, because my flat lease is an initial 6 months, that as soon as that time is up I’ll immediately be without housing and back to the renter’s rat race, ready to repeat the dance of telling some guy who’s supposed to understand how the economy works that PhDs are, in fact, a source of income, all over again.

Instead of celebrating a success, I am constantly waiting for the next rug-pull. I am so cautious to step anywhere, combing over every slightly frayed edge in the carpet that someone could snatch and yank from under my feet, because I am entirely convinced they will. That this is a simple inevitability if I stand—exist—here.

A rug-pull did happen, in fact. One morning, waking up in the middle of a field for day two of a music festival, I got an email with the result of my PhD application. It was sent at 1am. It was an autorejection.

And you know my first instinct was? That of course this would happen. That of course I’d be dragged along for this long to end up with absolutely nothing, processed and ghosted by a machine. Of course this was the same outcome as what happened with [redacted studio], and [redacted developer], and [redacted publisher]. Of course it would; of course it would.

At no point, did I even consider that there was a system error. That Salford’s IT infrastructure is notoriously touchy and sickly as a Victorian child. That the faculty would be on this in less than an hour to send me over the corrected offer letter, leaving me sat where I am right now. I didn’t even consider it. Why would I?

I touched on this before in another post. The idea that nothing good will ever happen to you. It has no relation to confidence, your perceived or actual skill, or any moves or plans you make to leverage your circumstances. It doesn’t matter. Every path has been blocked, un-natural disasters for one half and three people with more money than God holding the keys to the other. You have the choice of turning around on dwindling supplies, or hacking your way through the jungle with a rusty machete to contract dengue fever and die.

“Imposter syndrome” is constantly thrown around. I’m hearing it even more now that I’m in academia. Every other training session, the speaker has mentioned those words with a heap of resources behind them. Ways to mitigate it. Ways to grow beyond it to become fully realised as a researcher and person.

This isn’t imposter syndrome. This is a defense mechanism against something that did happen, will happen, and will not stop happening until the system collapses under its own weight. 

And I am deeply against calling this impostor syndrome. It is not a syndrome to simply know that you can’t get a career anymore, and to not expect anything from all the forms you fill in. It is not a syndrome to be constantly planning for the worst, because the worst is all that ever happens anymore. I am not an impostor in a world I am supposed to exist in, that everyone has made every effort to kick me out of. I have been banging on the door for the past year, met with silence, or someone swinging it open to throttle me in the face, not really sure which outcome I prefer. 

I am not sick. The system is sick.

Everyone Hates You

When illness is systemic, the system will try every measure to make you believe you’re the leper. That this is a personal affect, something you’ve brought to them, and not a condition arising from being forced into shapes your joints aren’t supposed to twist. In a way, that you’re fundamentally broken. You’re infectious.

People talking about leaving the games industry love to mention “transferable skills”. They say, quite rightly, that you aren’t just limited to putting “Unreal Engine 5” on your CV; there’s so much else that your role gives you. There’s more than enough ways to demonstrate those skills to potential employers, and show how well the act of delivering a complex, multi-faceted project spanning a variety of digital and analogue tech primes you more than well enough for a variety of other jobs.

No-one outside the industry believes this.

It’s hilarious, really, because it’s entirely true. Being involved in game development gives you such a breadth of skills and conflict resolution tactics that it makes most everything else look like child’s play in comparison. Half your time isn’t making games, actually, it’s putting out all the fires that result from having the audacity to even try, in whatever forms are most relevant to your discipline, more often than not ones far beyond it.

And not a single person who dangles the keys of job security in front of your face gives a single fuck about this. You were playing with toys. You were sat on your arse, probably in your pyjamas, playing video games all day. What would you possibly learn from that? What makes you think you’re a functional member of society?

You get the same question from everyone: “So, why aren’t you making games anymore?” Normally, this might be an interesting point of conversation. Why are you making the career shift? What’s attracted you to this role? Of course, none of these questions have any answer beyond “I need money, and you seem to have money I can exchange for my labour,” but sometimes these are genuine questions blind to the ills of capitalism, where they entirely forget, consciously or not, that they’re the ones holding the power in this exchange. 

However, as a game dev, this goes from a curiosity into an accusation. This isn’t a lighthearted query, or an assessment of how good of a fit you are for this job. This is a finger-point to demand why you were off making games in the first place. You betrayed the “normal” working world, you see, so what makes you think you can come crawling back into it?

Of course, saying that the industry is imploding and you would like money to eat food is not an acceptable response. You have to beg and grovel, rehearse a humiliation ritual that this was your passion all along. That time in the games industry? That was nothing. No, what you really want is to be a cog in a corporate Nothing that will probably go under in a few years.

And then none of them believe you.

Because why would they believe you? You’ve spent the last 4 years of your life bumming off making video games. You’ve had a taste of Freedom, in their eyes, where they don’t see the soul-sucking reality of execs who know nothing but financial trends and the health-destroying non-mandatory-only-in-name crunch and the leagues of consumers doxxing you over a bug that wastes three, perhaps four, minutes of their life.

This is where I bring this into something tangible, that since being laid off and before starting the PhD, I’ve been rejected from over 500 “normal” jobs. From “giving up” on games jobs and opening the search wider, that’s a rate of two and a half rejections a day.

One job asked for an interview on Saturday morning, and when I asked for a different time, was blocked on Indeed. One job promised a test into a potential offer that I followed up on three times, and said they would not be sending it over seven months later. One reached out to me, and once I gave my availability, was told the position had been filled, three hours after first contact.

A further 98 rejections were games-specific, with higher interview hits, only proving the point. Being a game dev makes you unemployable to anything that isn’t being a game dev. And now, with nowhere to be a game dev, you’re just unemployable.

I had one out that other devs don’t. Before my role at Supermassive, I worked in marketing. I used that single anchor to the “normal” working world to make a case that I wanted to come back. That the games industry wasn’t what I was expecting, and I was happy to make it a hobby while re-polishing the marketing skills I’d still been keeping up on the side.

And they still didn’t believe me.

Everytime I did get an interview, seeing an actual person’s face, it was that fucking question. One asked it thrice in the same interview, and shook his head after I re-worded the answer for a third time. One laughed. One just turned to his colleague, said this was an “introductory talk”, and kicked me from the call. I was given a rejection email before I closed the tab.

Five hundred applications. And I’m supposed to believe I’m the one who’s sick.

Then, really, you can blame the system all you want, and you can tell yourself you’re not infected, but what does that really matter when everyone else refuses to believe you?

I Refuse to Heal

This is a lyric from a song by Caligula’s Horse, Charcoal Grace III: Vigil. The line struck me, as many of their lyrics do, quite severely. Because Jim Grey is one of the greatest lyricists in progressive metal right now, there’s layers of depth in its interpretation, going between the storyline interpretation of a son grappling with his abusive father’s death, to a grander anger at how most every government failed its population during the pandemic. 

Being selfish like everyone is, I related it to this entire ordeal. If I’m designated by the world to be sick, what use would there be in trying to heal? Why would I want to heal for a world that hates me? I don’t give a shit about being normal. I want to make my sicko art for a bunch of other sickos and live in peace, and I’ll do that in spite of everything that doesn’t want me to.

And then, who the fuck am I to say this?

It’s all well and good for me to make this a grand artistic statement, rejecting the rat-race to pursue my own interests fully, while I can sit smugly in my reasonably-sized apartment and make games and read books and chat to devs and write words for a three-year living. What about everyone else?

The system is broken. The games industry is broken. Being a game dev makes you unemployable. Don’t release a game, lose your job. Release a game, lose your job. Try to find a non-games job, starve. You cannot win. You can’t even luck yourself into a win anymore. And the only solution offered to this is a so-called syndrome and selfcare exercises.

I’m mad. I’m really, really fucking mad.