The first thing I ever wanted to be as a kid was a zookeeper. The blame for that is Zoo Tycoon, a series of computer games where you build your own zoo. The hottest edition was the one where you could replicate Jurassic Park, without all the chaos and death, unless you were in it for the chaos and death. I sometimes was.

But that aside, little ten-year-old me, or however old I was at the time, saw these parks popping up with lions and tigers and anteaters (I think there were anteaters) and dolphins and sea turtles and, of course, the motherfucking dinosaurs. No park was complete without a fully grown t. rex looking for weak points in your fence so that it could get out and wreak some chaos and death.

That dream only lasted so long. Grew out of it. Nowadays, I realize that being a zookeeper is nothing like Zoo Tycoon. Rather than building rad parks and marveling at how quickly the guests eat their lunches, you just feed animals, clean out their exhibits, give them shots, and try not to get mauled by the leopards. It's not a terrible career path, just not whatever romanticized job probably-ten-year-old me was picturing.

After that, I wanted to be a swordsman. Blame Zelda for that. My little boy mind was convinced I could make a killing being badass like Link. I'd swing my sword around, defeat bad guys, hookshot across rooftops, dive into dungeons, and embark on the most epic quests. Don't laugh. I settled for swordsman because it was more realistic than Pokémon Trainer.

When I realized cutting people down wasn't a viable career option, I took inspiration from Zelda again and decided I wanted to make medicine.

In Ocarina of Time, you've got your three potions: Red, Green, and Blue. For whatever reason, little boy me was like, “That's cool!” and wanted to make Zelda potions in real life, but, as you might've guessed, since Zelda potions don't exist, I settled for making actual medicines. I was pretty arrogant about it, too. My whole attitude was, “Painkillers that only last 24 hours? How unambitious! I'll make something that alleviates pain for a whole week!”

That aspiration lasted three days, I think.

There's something about myself I have to admit, and it'll come as a shock to some of you. Are you ready for this?

I love video games.

I know, I know. Unbelievable. I loved video games so much as a kid that anything that wasn't an adventure/murder simulation was perceived as boring by my limited attention span. TV was all right on occasion, but books? Eww! Boring! No thanks.

My mom, who is a part-time bibliophile, did not care for that attitude one bit and made it her life's mission to make a reader out of me. I frequently thwarted her attempts by shelving the books she gave me and disregarding their existence thereafter, but she must've gotten sweet with my middle school principal because the thirty minutes after lunch was dedicated reading time. Three words could not be more toxic to a non-reader like myself, and let me tell you, I rebelled against this violation of human rights. Rather than reading a proper work of fiction like they intended, I read a dictionary. Worst form of rebellion ever. You ever try reading a dictionary? A blank wall has more entertainment value.

My weak boy spirit crumbled, so I caved, bringing in Dragon Rider, the novel my mom bought me at the last Scholastic book fair.

Let me tell you, that book was fly. It had dragons, it had dudes riding a dragon around the world, it had a dragon that was for some reason weak to fire. I loved that book so much that I wanted to write my own novel, so I did.

My mom was so proud. You'd think I'd told her I wanted to cure cancer. She didn't have Office on her computer, so she set me up with Notepad, and that was how I began my lustrous career as a successful author.

JK, JK. Obviously, I'm not successful nor an author, so I'm sure as hell not a successful author. What happened, I hear you asking. Did I do what most fledging authors do: start off strong, for all of three days, then call it quits because “the mood didn't strike”? Believe it or not, I was dedicated to that novel. Almost every night, after I got out of the shower, I was tapping away at the keyboard, bringing my debut masterpiece to work. I could see the glowing reviews and the New York Times Bestseller label already.

My days as a writer came to an end when the computer committed suicide. My mom had had it forever, so it was overdue to go up in smoke at some point. She had me prepared for such a situation, because she bought me a flashdrive and instructed me to always, always back up my work. My novel was safe, but without a computer to work on, progress was put on hiatus. By the time she scrounged together the funds for a replacement, the urge to write was gone. My hero's fantastical journey to slay the evil villain would never see its conclusion.

In case you're wondering what twelve-year-old Grant was writing, it was the Windwaker. I was shamelessly ripping off the Windwaker. Even kicked off with a giant bird invading the protagonist's home island, though my giant bird was mechanical, so it was original, went my logic back then. Don't know how I justified plagiarizing Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! monsters.

At some point, I think I entertained the prospect of being a veterinarian? I can't remember. I might be making that up.

My next career aspiration was my biggest.

As you might've guessed by now, I'm a gamer. Huge fan of games. If I'm not getting shot down left and right by women, there's a controller or handheld in my hand. They're my life, my passion, and if I didn't have video games, I'd be bored out of my skull. Makes me wonder how our ancestors made it through the day without games to occupy their time.

I was sitting at home one day, shortly before I entered high school, I think, with G4 on. Crappy channel, but back then, when it had all these shows on gaming news and such, it was da bomb.

Anyway, commercials came on, and the gist of one was, “Hey! You like video games? Guess what—you can go to college and learn how to make them.”

That blew my mind. I've been playing video games since I was six or seven, but I was under the assumption that they came out of the void or something. Never did it occur to me that there were real people behind the title and that I could become one of those real people. It might have been a thirty-second commercial for some dubious college that probably wasn't even accredited, but those were thirty seconds that changed my life.

Fast-forward to the Karraker invasion, and my college plans got put on hold for obvious reasons. The college I'd been aiming to go to was a pile of rubble, so I forewent college and struck out on my own as an indie developer.

Yeah, that didn't work out, long story short. If you want the deets, it was a combination of being incompetent, being unable to find human beings and not ghosts, and getting addicted to playing games over making them.

A list of solo indie developers is a Google search away—Toby Fox, that guy who made Stardew Valley, that Pope guy who made Papers, Please, that guy who made Cave Story. Those were my heroes when I was making games. My dream was to add my name to that list.

The thing about going solo, as the adjective indicates, is that you're responsible for everything. Sprites, music, design, programming, marketing, writing. You gotta learn how to swap out multiple hats and look good in each of them, and the hat for programming was always too big for my noggin.

Learning programming to me was like dissecting a frog and finding a banana lodged inside. Stuff seemed haphazardly inserted, and none of that stuff made a lick of sense. Once, I found an “easy” tutorial on programming hit collision from a sword, and the tutor essentially went, “Okay, you do this, insert this, add this, do that, write this, install that, edit this, copy this and paste that, and you're done! Easy!”

“What part of that was easy?!” I shouted at my computer screen. The asshole flew down a laundry list of instructions, and I didn't understand why half the stuff was put in, since he didn't bother explaining himself.

There have also been instances where I follow along with a video and copy the code word-for-word and somehow, some way, the code doesn't work.

Then there was that one time I wanted to include both wall jumps and walking on angles in a platformer. I found a tutorial for wall jumps, and I found a tutorial for walking on angles, but not a tutorial that combined both. And guess what happened when I combined the two. I pressed jump and the game crashed.

“Wonderful...”

Thankfully, I'm not the only person on the planet trying to make games. With billions of people on the internet at any given time, finding a teammate is a forum ad away.

And yet finding someone who'll stick around is one of life's greatest challenges.

I won't bore you with the specifics. It's the same story every time, anyway. I type up an ad, get some responses, weed out the applicants who are complete shite, hire on whoever's decent, and then watch as they mysteriously vanish from the face of this Earth within two weeks' time.

The straw that broke the camel's back was my gaming addiction. It was unrelated to my indie dev career. When I wasn't at either of my jobs, I was seated in front of my computer, turning pixels into people or drafting up level layouts, or tried to be. But when you wake up for a six-in-the-morning shift and go straight from that job to the next, your brain's too fried to do anything even remotely productive. So, I unwound by knocking out my backlog of titles.

Sometimes, you play a game, and it's all right. Sometimes, you play a game, and you're hooked. You have to see what happens next, you have to fight and win that next battle, because if you don't, your mind's constantly niggling you like, Hey, hey! Listen! We gotta play that game, man, we gotta play it! Don't you wanna see what happens next? Don't you wanna see which girl the hero chooses? You're nowhere close to done leveling up your party. Why not dedicate some time to that? Should only take fifteen minutes.

I was real bad back then. I'm still bad now, I will admit, but on the rare occasion when I had a full day off, from the time I woke up until I went to bed, my butt was firmly planted in front of my TV screen. Not because I wanted to be there, but because I had to be there. Keep in mind that I had a game to work on, yet instead I was playing games. Progress came to a sudden halt, and just like with my novel, when I tried getting back into it, the spark was gone. The progress I had made was all alien, and I didn't know how to get back into the groove. And so, my latest dream in life came to an end.

I loved game development. It was a blast flipping open a sketchbook and drafting a full level, concepts for enemies, how certain attacks would animate. It was the most fun I ever had working. I even had the time of my life slapping my name on Windwaker in novel format.

But there's something wrong with me. Anytime I start a project, I dedicate my being to it, all cylinders on full blast, but the second there's a pause in my work schedule, the passion becomes work, and I can't bear to even look at it.

Maybe neither is my passion in life.

Maybe my passion in life is in constant flux.

I've had those thoughts and plenty of others while laying in bed, staring out my window. Unfortunately, I haven't come up with answers. The one thing I definitely want, always, no question about it, is a girlfriend. Maybe my true purpose in life is to become a househusband. It's the twenty-first century. Women can be the breadwinners and men the cleaners and cookers. I make a pretty mean cheesesteak, if I say so myself.

But cleaning sucks, and the only plus about cooking is that it sits a meal in front of me, and I do love me a good meal. Too bad nobody pays you to eat.

What's worse is that nobody pays you to play video games, either. Playtesters exist, and I've looked into that, and it's no fun. What you're playing is a title in the middle of development. It's buggy, characters don't feel right, and sometimes, you have to play the same character or level dozens and dozens of times. I don't want the job of games ruining the hobby of games.

Sooooo, that's where I'm at. Into nerd culture but got no career aspirations to capitalize on those passions. To be frank, I don't care anymore about trying to write the next bestseller or program the latest indie craze to hit the web. All I want is a beautiful girlfriend at my side and all the time in the world to be with her, play games, and play games with her. A gaming girlfriend would be hot.