A look back at what happened this year. A public storage of my memories and wishes for the future.

Previously: Pt. 6 :: Winning an award :: 💜

(Isn’t it funny how I’ve been dragging these posts since December last year?)

Alright, Germany, have it your way.

So last May the DCP surprised big time my colleague and dear friend Leonie Wolf and awarded the Sonderpreis der Jury (the Jury Prize) to the #FemDevsMeetup. While we sort out the logistics of how to deal with the prize and how we’ll spend it back into the community, I’m trying to delegate functions onto the new members of the organizational team. At this point it’s been 6 years since I joined and I think other women need the spotlight (which comes with great responsibilities). I’ll still be around, though.

To be honest, I started writing these posts because I wanted to reassure myself —and perhaps others—, that specializations are a small unit of a larger understanding, and never in substitution of a broader knowledge.

I never wanted to be a cog in the wheel. I refused to be fast at modelling props or cleaning up MoCaps. Many things that in theory would have given me a stable job. I sincerely don’t know how I’ve managed it. As I said previously, few people can afford not working, but what I think I always had the advantage to do was being able to bring my broad skills wherever.

I’ll make websites again for money, or storyboard, or be the boom operator, the techie in an art project, the artist in a dry IT application. I don’t care.

For now games bring me joy, the people I make games with do. I just think that my world, my survival chances, and -most importantly- my sanity would have been much smaller if I only knew how to do my job. And I couldn’t care less about the pragmatic view on this, about whether or not that makes me more or less useful. Seeing it in the long run I guess it does, but that’s coincidental. You can see I’m great at giving career advice.

I once liked making games. And theater plays. And singing opera with my family. Drawing my pen-and-paper characters. Playing guitar only to myself. Writing episodic tales of a dystopic future that, later on in my life, happened to be miserably accurate. If not for the events and imagined technology, for the boring, isolating, mandatory corporate individualism of the internet we live in. Creative output is not a measure of worth, and worth is not equivalent to being a productive member of society.

Anyways, last summer I tried to itemize the things I do professionally and put them together in my website:

1. technical art and animation for games,
2. organizing safe gamedev meetups throughout Germany with the Fem Devs
3. and applying my academic background on analyzing this medium for expanding my understanding of it. There is no praxis without theory, and there is no theory without praxis.

As reductive as that is, nothing else should be of notice. If you got until the end, I hope that what you read between the lines was worth going through my effusive dismissal of personal branding strategies. At the very least, it was nice to put everything into words, that is, everything that I’m willing to put out in the open.

Take care.