Gaming —

A journey of self-discovery: Gamer Unplugged roams across America

Armed with a Greyhound bus pass, wireless broadband, and handheld consoles.

Backpacking nomad or game journalist? In this case, a little of both!
Backpacking nomad or game journalist? In this case, a little of both!

Writing about games for a living is a great career, but the day-to-day reality of the job is not exactly what you'd call adventurous. Aside from the occasional faux-glamorous trade show or press demo, the job mainly consists of sitting and staring at a variety of screens displaying word processors, Twitter messages, e-mails, instant messages, and Skype chats. And occasionally a game or two, if you're lucky.

Then there's Justin Amirkhani. Over the last three months, his life writing about games and the people who make them has, by necessity, included taking a ride with a gun-toting John and his hooker, running out on a bar bill alongside belligerent Toronto sports fans, breaking up a brawl in a Tucson alleyway, and enduring bus bathrooms coated with human excrement. Not your typical game journalist experience, to say the least.

For nearly three months now, Amirkhani has been on a cross-country trek visiting dozens of North American game development studios both big and small and telling their stories on his blog, Gamer Unplugged. It's an idea that first came together when a colleague at a Sony preview event told him about Greyhound's Discovery pass, which lets a person travel as much as they want across Canada and the US for one flat monthly fee. Amirkhani said he started planning his grand trek before the event was even over, and began taking online donations to fund the adventure two weeks later. Within a month, he had sold his apartment and most of his possessions, and was living on the road with a backpack full of just the essentials: clothes, a laptop, some portable game systems, chargers, and a wireless broadband connection.

"They're the people that you meet, when you're walking down the street, they're the people that you meeeeeeet, each daaaaaaaaay."
"They're the people that you meet, when you're walking down the street, they're the people that you meeeeeeet, each daaaaaaaaay."
Giving up domestic comforts for a life of sleeping on overnight buses and cheap hostels wasn't actually all that difficult. "The thing I found hard was sustaining my lifestyle in Toronto," he said. "It seemed like a lot of work for something that wasn't making me very happy... I went through all my things and decided what I cared about, and I didn't really care about any of it anymore... I don't really give a shit about my book collection or my games or my furniture. It's just stuff."

What Amirkhani has given up in possessions he's gained back in interesting life experiences, many of which have been highlighted on the blog. Amirkhani says he's always had a certain talent for "falling into situations" that others might avoid. "I'm not one to shy away from a weird situation," he told Ars. "If things are going bad, I'm definitely interested in seeing just how bad things are going to get before they break. Call that bravery, stupidity... I don't know what it is, but where most people would cut and run, I stick around. In the back of my mind, as bad as things are getting, I'm thinking 'this is going to be a great story.'"

As those great stories continue to amass, the scope of the writing on Gamer Unplugged has evolved to include at least as many "travel posts" as stories drawn from studio visits, a change Amirkhani says the readers have responded to positively. "I think that it's feeding something that's different from what a lot of people get from most outlets," he said. "In my heart I'm still in love with game development... These are the most talented people in the entertainment business, and I want to meet them and I want to know what they're like. But the truth is, game developers—very often their life is sitting at a desk. And as talented and as entertaining as they can be, sometimes the stories that come out of it are less exciting than the travel stories."

"The most talented people in the entertainment business"

Amirkhani hams it up during a visit to Sony Santa Monica.
Amirkhani hams it up during a visit to Sony Santa Monica.
After visiting over 20 different developers so far, from California to Massachusetts and everywhere in between, Amirkhani says he's gained a new respect for the sheer difficulty of game development. "This is not a path for the faint of heart," he said of the developers he has met. "You have to be incredibly talented and incredibly hard-working and then it still doesn't work sometimes."

Amirkhani has also started to quickly develop a sense for the studios and developers whose motivations are not driven purely by creative concerns. "I can smell when a developer is just there because it's a hot business," he said. "I can smell who the real creative types are, the ones with real passion. It's usually in the way they start talking about their studio. ... If they're talking about how efficient they are, what sort of numbers they pull, that kind of thing, I know they're there as a business. They may create great works, but they're not there to be a creative endeavor."

The trip has given Amirkhani a greater appreciation for the wide variety of working environments and structures that the industry can support, from the "unbelievable facilities" of Epic's headquarters to the close-knit husband-and-wife camaraderie of Ska Studios' James and Michelle Silva ("I've never seen a regular husband and wife that can be around each other for more than two hours, but they work together 24/7," he said. "It's the cutest thing in the world").

Amirkhani also marveled at the surprisingly wide range of personalities in game development, he said, from the "wise beyond his years" insight of thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen to the "amazing character" of Postal developer Vince Desi. "I've never seen somebody who honestly is beyond the point of giving a shit what anybody thinks about him," Amirkhani said of Desi. "He does not care, and so he makes what he wants, to hell with the business of it. That's something I can completely respect. You might not think of him as a traditional indie developer since we've started coloring all indie developers as these creative arty types, but he is at his soul an indie developer, and he's been doing it longer than anybody else."

The thing uniting them all, Amirkhani said, is an extreme passion for the medium that drives the entire business. "I don't know if it's some great collective sickness where we all have this addiction to the scene, but it's definitely there," he said. "Everybody in the industry has that moment where they realize that games is what they want to do. You can fall into any number of careers by accident, but you can't fall into games by accident. It's too hard to do."

A journey of self-discovery

More than the lessons about game development, though, Amirkhani said his trip has given him an entirely new outlook on life outside the walls of a digital monitor.

"Before I left I was a desk jockey all the time," he recalled. "I never really did much, I never travelled, I never did anything, I just chilled in my apartment, played games, and wrote. Now, games are still fun, I still love them, but they're not as interesting as real life. Writing about games is still something I have a passion for, and I could do that forever, but I don't think I would be experiencing all that I could if that's all I did."

"There's a lot to be said about becoming a multifaceted person," he continued. "I think too often... we get too hung up on defining ourselves by our hobbies. We're people, we're so much more than that... It goes back to the adage 'all things in moderation.' It's cool to be attached to a community, it's cool to be attached to a subculture. It's great for building friendships, great for building relationships, great for building self-identity. But if you get so wrapped up in a subculture that that's all you are, then you've lost a great deal of who you could be."

Currently, Amirkhani has enough donations to pay for his bus pass and wireless Internet at least through October, if he doesn't worry about small things like eating or sleeping. But he hopes to keep travelling and sharing his stories for much longer than that, and doesn't exactly relish the idea of returning to his old life.

"I stopped back in Toronto for a week or two [and] I've never felt so agitated in my life," he said of a recent stop to recharge. "Sitting in one place, especially a very familiar place—I didn't like that at all. I had to wait to leave, because I was waiting on some paperwork, and every day I just wanted to get out of there."

Channel Ars Technica