Starting Sabbatical

My wife and I recently left our positions at Bungie. We’re taking a break through July, then I’m doing a working sabbatical for 6-12 months, depending on how things go. The sabbatical is largely about exploring potential career pivots away from traditional game development — which I’ve been doing for the last 20 years — and into a storytelling focus, likely in linear media.

Of course, everyone we know thinks we’re insane for doing this, and their well-meaning questions echo many of our own anxieties, which we’ve been planning against for the better part of a year.

Let’s talk through them.

Why leave Bungie? Isn't that a dream job for so many folks?

• I was too far away from the player experience. My work was technical, not creative.
• I didn't have a path into the kind of storytelling I wanted to do, because the stories Bungie wants to tell are very different from the kinds of stories that currently animate me.
• The job wasn't leaving me any bandwidth for my art. The complexity of Destiny and the grind of the live-service release schedule took too much of my capacity.
• Dream jobs are still jobs. They still have annoying problems and frustrating assignments; they still place demands on your time and risk exhaustion and burnout; and they still limit your freedom and capture most of the value of your labor.

Why leave games? Doesn't that waste 20 years of invested time and effort?

• Games have spent the last decade or more leaning further into live service and engagement metrics, and devaluing or eliminating storytelling as a goal. (Yes, there are counterexamples, but they’re getting fewer and farther between with every passing year.)
• Severe layoffs and studio closures, with little relief in sight, have made games an increasingly hostile place to make a stable living.
• Everyone seems to be circling the wagons around existing franchise IPs to reduce risk. Appetite for new art among investors is largely gone.

What about going indie? Couldn't you just make the next Undertale or something?

• I did indie once before, with Legacy of the Elder Star, and found that my resources were too limited to execute anywhere close to my full vision.
• Building an indie studio requires far more investment than is currently available in the industry, and far more scale than I want to spend my time managing.
• Storytelling is just one of several pillars that make up a game, and making the game is just one of several pillars that make up a business. I want to focus on storytelling, not balance it against a hundred competing priorities.
• Gamergate severely shook my faith in the community, and I'm seeing a resurgence of that kind of harassment and toxicity today. I want to make art for kind people, and not have to spend a bunch of my time cleaning up after trolls and watching my creative friends get run out of the space.

Aren't you going to have to start again from the bottom, wherever you go next?

• That implies that any income-generating activity necessarily exists on a ladder, where the bottom is “bad” and the top is “good”. But people make a living at many different places on that ladder. If our focus is sustainability — not maximum wealth generation — then the ladder itself stops being a useful metaphor. We start where we start, and up isn’t the only direction to grow.
• Skills are transferable once abstracted from their specific context. Career pivots depend on this. We don’t lose our accumulated knowledge and experience as humans just because we transitioned into a different industry.

Isn't it a huge risk to give up a job in the current job market, with all the layoffs and studio closures going on, not to mention the existential threat of generative AI?

• Every big forward step in my life and career has started with taking a risk. Why would I expect this one to come risk-free?
• The alternative was staying in place, suffering deteriorating mental health, and continuing to defer our own needs, just to keep making the line go up. The line is not a life.
• If I'm leaving games anyway, then why be concerned about the state of the games job market?

Isn't it irresponsible to give up your income when you've got a baby at home and two special needs kids to take care of, plus a mortgage to pay in a high cost of living area?

• I have a nest egg from selling my house in Utah, and that gives us a significant runway. (Yes, this is the hard-to-replicate cheat code of “privilege and luck”.)
• We want the kids to understand that they don’t need to accept circumstances that don’t work for them, and that people can change their circumstances through direct action. To teach that, we need to model it.
• We can always sell the house and move somewhere cheaper if it comes down to it. Home ownership is an asset; it's part of how you buy yourself this kind of freedom under capitalism.

What about health insurance? What about sustainability?

• Washington State has a good health insurance marketplace. Living in a blue state has its perks. This is one of the ways in which politics actually matters!
• We're budgeting specifically for sabbatical mode, including reasonable lifestyle adjustments to reduce our monthly expenses.
• Working a full time job made us spend way more to cope with our limited bandwidth due to the job: DoorDash meals, landscaping and maid services, etc. Quitting eliminates a huge amount of that budget pressure by giving us the time back to handle our own lives instead of paying to outsource them.

Isn't art a poor man’s game? Aren't you setting yourself up for long-term failure?

• Why do we assume corporate careers will be successful and artistic ones will be failures?
• Who says art has to make as much money as tech in order to be considered a success?
• Maybe the answer isn't to figure out how to make a lot of money from art, but to figure out how to make enough money while leaving space for art. In which case, we need to figure out what that space looks like, before we can figure out how to build other income-generating activities around it.

What would it take to go back to games? What's the backup plan if storytelling doesn't work out?

• I'd need a strong income, a sustainable studio, a flexible schedule with a remote work focus, a grown-up studio culture, a game that fits with my artistic values, and direct access to the creative side of the work.
• The backup plan is probably a non-games tech job with a remote work focus, calibrated below my maximum capability, with the goal of leaving space for my art. However, there are plenty of non-tech jobs out there that could work, too, as long as they’re flexible enough to still let me be an involved parent and a creator.

What does success look like? Why do you think there's a path to it? Why do you think you can walk that path?

• Success looks like me being a happier and healthier human, and setting a better example for our kids. Creative work is my oxygen. I've been deprived of it for too long, and that's made it hard to be the best version of myself.
• Defining success in an achievable way that's based on our own real needs is very different from chasing capitalism’s definition of it. We're focused on sustainable joy, not infinite growth.
• There are a million unknowns on this path, but I love learning, I'm open to new experiences and challenges, and I'm tenacious as all hell. Those are superpowers when dealing with ambiguity.

Why aren't more people doing this? Is this anti-capitalist praxis?

• It's fucking terrifying, is what it is!
• Many people haven't been able to accumulate the resources we have to be able to self-fund this, through no real fault of their own. Getting stuck on the rent treadmill is especially challenging here, as are student loans and runaway credit card debt.
• Privilege and luck are life's cheat codes. They're not fairly distributed, which sucks, but since we have access to them, we're going to use them. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to pay it forward.
• I think this is a way of engaging with capitalism on our own terms, rather than accepting the default assumptions of exploitation and infinite growth. I don't think any of us get to opt out of capitalism in today's world, but we can push back on its hegemony by engaging with it from a place of degrowth, sustainability, and mutual care.
• Somebody has to model this shit. If you like what we're doing, make your own plans and talk about them publicly. Find your community, share your goals, and start figuring out how you can help each other. I know that has very “draw the rest of the fucking owl” energy, but it actually is the path forward.

If you’re interested in a career pivot of your own, here’s some recommended reading that helped me organize my priorities and plan an intentional approach to this process:

• Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra
• Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work by Joanne Lipman