Search Term: Game Design Vacation
February 16, 2009
The platform that I use to publish this blog lets me see the search terms that bring people here. Today, I noticed this:
Game Design Vacation
Since this is my actual job, it never occurred to me that anyone would want to do this as a vacation activity (though I end up thinking about it and playing games a great deal on my vacations).
Was this a rogue search term, or is it something you would actually pay to do? What would it involve?
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Applied Game Design 
Hmm, that wasn’t my search term, but I’d love to be able to justify taking time off of work to actually run the exercises in your textbook in a concentrated fashion with other people.
Well, I’m looking forward to the FDG cruise in April as a game design vacation. In fact, I’m taking the whole month between GDC and FDG as a working vacation around the US, including visits to a couple of universities to talk about games.
As for weird search terms, ever since I wrote an 8 kind of fun analysis of sex, my most common search term is some variant of “fun sex games”.
On this topic, I notice that Emagination run game design camps for 15-18 year olds. I used to go to tech camps like this when I was a kid. I suppose it would kind of be like an extended Game Jam.
Sounds like a blast to me. I mean it’s like taking out the cooperate aspect and designing games for fun and passion. Personally, I think it would be a good idea for professional teams to do this kind of thing once or twice a year to keep the team passionate about making games. A game designer who’s lost the fun and passion of making games is like a game designer who doesn’t play games, to me at least.
During the Psychonauts production, the team took time off to make their own little games to refresh their minds and oil the engine, so to speak. That to me seems like a vacation from a project and a fun one at that.
People go on vacation to “get away from it all.” Game design isn’t something you can get away from, nor is it something you want to get away from. Designing itself is fun and you get to make fun games in the process. Everything can be turned into a game, even vacationing from game design, where you are attempting to design a game about vacationing from game design…