The Box Isn't Real

Press Start

The box isn't real. The player is. The shitshow definitely is. Hold those three and you've already got most of what I believe about making games. Everything after this is me explaining why, at length, because I genuinely cannot shut the fuck up.

Let me be honest up front, so we both know what this is. I'm a know-it-all. Ask anyone on my team. I physically cannot sit through a meeting without dropping some faltu gyaan (roughly: useless, unsolicited wisdom nobody asked for) about how the thing we're building is secretly about something deeper, something human, something I was absolutely not asked to explain. It's insufferable as shit. I know. I've made my peace with it. My team is... getting there.

So instead of inflicting it on five people at a time in a conference room, I'm writing it down to inflict it on everyone at once. Scale, baby. Very efficient. Very KPI.

These are my shit takes. Some of them will be shit for you. Some of them might be THE shit for you. Most of them I earned the slow, dumb, expensive way: bad calls, weird meetings, builds that caught fire if you looked at them wrong, opinions I held with total fucking confidence right up until reality kicked my teeth in, and the occasional moment where something clicked and I immediately pretended I'd known it all along.

Now the part that's harder to write.

I spent a long time being very good at being useful. Production. Deadlines. KPIs, optimisation, whatever the trend was that quarter, and under all of it the thing nobody puts on a CV, which is survival. I got excellent at shipping. Somewhere in there I stopped being myself while I did it, and I could not have told you when, because it does not happen on a Tuesday. It happens over about four years. The work was good. It was also hollow. Thak gaya, we say at home, which people translate as tired but actually means finished, done in, the battery is out. I was that, at thirty-four, with a job I was good at.

Then I became a father, and it landed in a way I did not see coming. I started asking what I actually wanted to spend the rest of my life making, and "emotionally empty but commercially smart" quietly stopped being an answer I could live with.

And underneath all of it was something I had buried. I became a game designer because games made me feel like I mattered when real life often did not. They gave me somewhere to belong. They made me feel capable, and hopeful, and less alone. Fourteen years in, I had slowly stopped loving the thing that once saved me. This book is partly me trying to find that again, out loud, in public, which is either brave or stupid and is probably both.

It's for me, first. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I'm writing it because writing it down is the only way I find out what I actually believe, instead of what I say to sound clever in the moment. Who else it's for, the next section sorts out with dice.

This isn't a design bible. I don't trust bibles, in design or anywhere else. The useful rules are only useful until they meet a better exception, and then they just sit there looking stupid while everyone pretends they never believed them. Been there. Believed a few. Felt like a dumbass every single time.

What it is, if it's anything, is a hitchhiker's guide to the game design galaxy. Incomplete on purpose. Opinionated by construction. Wrong in places, and I won't know which places until somebody tells me, loudly, probably on the internet. Mostly it's trying to be decent company while you find your own way through. Bring a towel. Don't panic.

So treat it like a toolbox with dents in it. Take what helps, argue with what doesn't, and throw away anything that makes your game worse, which will be more of it than either of us would like. I'm not teaching you from the top of Game Design Mountain. I'm an opinionated bastard comparing scars, hoping one of mine saves you a bruise.

Fair warning, since we're being honest. I swear. A lot. Like, a fucking lot. The vulgarity isn't a marketing bit, it's how I talk when I actually mean something, and a sanded-down version of this book would be a lie about who wrote it. If that's a dealbreaker, no hard feelings. There's a very nice book about agile somewhere with your name on it.

One more confession while the honesty tap is open. I took help from AI on this book. Structure, grammar, the order things go in, the odd sentence that wouldn't sit still. Shabd mere hain, edit thoda AI ne kiya hai. The words are mine; the machine did a bit of editing. The ideas are mine too, and so are the scars, and you can't prompt your way to fourteen years of getting kicked in the teeth. But the untangling, the framing, the arguing at 2 AM with something that never gets tired and occasionally tells me my plan is stupid... yeah, a machine helped with that, the way a whetstone helps a blade. I talk, it sharpens, I decide. If that bothers you, fair enough, put the book down. I'd rather tell you on page one than have you find out later and wonder what else I dressed up. The brain is the weapon. The whetstone is still mine. The oil is just new.

The box was never real. Neither is this book.

It could be shit for you, or it could be THE shit for you. Only one way to find out.

Character Select

Every campaign starts the same way. A table, some snacks nobody's sharing, and a DM who has clearly been waiting all week for people to sit the fuck down and listen to him. Hi. That's me. I built this dungeon, I wrote the lore, and I'll be doing all the voices, badly, whether you like it or not.

Roll your stats. I'll wait. Not for long. Hurry the fuck up.

Strength: useless, it's a book. Dexterity: only matters when you throw it across the room and then try to catch it. Constitution: you'll need it, some chapters are long and I'm not sorry. Intelligence: you've got it, you bought a book about game design, which is either very smart or a cry for help. Wisdom: the stat this book claims to be selling, and I'll be the first to admit I don't have a whole lot of it myself. Charisma: I've met game designers. Dump that shit.

One stat actually matters, and it's not on the sheet: whether you'll let your assumptions get kicked in the teeth by a man who's mostly doing it to himself. Rolled low? Good. Low rolls make better stories. Ask me how I know. Actually, don't. It takes thirty-three chapters.

Pick a class. Choose carefully, there's no respec. Kidding. It's a book. Respec whenever the hell you like.

The Fresh Spawn

You just walked out of the tutorial with a wooden sword and a shitload of opinions. You believe the best idea wins the meeting. You believe crunch happens to other people. Adorable. Naive as hell, but adorable. I was you, and I'd like to hug you and then take your lunch money, as a lesson. The asides with your name on them are the warnings nobody gave me. Read them. Ignore them. Come back in five years and read them again, crying a little.

The Hollow Veteran

You've shipped things. A lot of things. You've saved builds at three in the morning for people who couldn't spell your name. Somewhere along the way the game stopped being fun and started being a job, and you didn't notice when, because it doesn't happen on a Tuesday. This book is mostly for you, because I was you, and some days I still am. You're not crazy. It did cost you something. You're allowed to want it back.

The Crossover

Artists, programmers, QA, producers. The people who actually build the damn thing while we draw three boxes and an arrow and call it a system. You've wondered, with love, what the fuck we do all day. Fair. This book won't fully answer that. It might make you hate us slightly less. No promises.

The Outsider

You don't make games. You came for the stories, or somebody handed you this book and you're too polite to put it down. Welcome. Under all the jargon there's a family getting knocked down and mending itself, a boy who wanted a warp drive, and a man who found somewhere to belong and then slowly lost it. You don't need to know what a skill tree is. The glossary's at the back. I'm thoughtful like that. Occasionally.

Player Two

Player Two isn't a class either. She's the one who sat down on the couch next to me, picked up the second controller, and hasn't let me rage-quit since. She's my wife. She shows up in this book less than she deserves and more than she'd like.

The Princess

The Princess is not on the character sheet at all. She is behind a wall you only strike because it looked a little different from the others.

She is my daughter. Some pages call her Filia, some call her Girl, depending on how close to the bone I am. She is why this book exists. One day she will ask what I made with my one life, and I want an answer I do not have to translate.

Some lines are hers. Read them gently. You are reading over someone's shoulder.

Girl, if you are reading this: the box was never real. You are.

Class Change

Spawns turn into Veterans too fast. Veterans, if the dice are kind, turn back into Spawns. Everyone, eventually, is Player Two to somebody.

Everyone reads everything. Nothing branches. I'm a game designer, not a monster. Mostly. It's the DM screen, man. It does things to a person.

Right. Snacks down, phones away, torches lit. Let's fucking ride.

Prologue

Tutorial Island

You've chosen your character. Now the game would like to teach you how to play. There's no fucking skip button, and the difficulty was set before you were born. The industry calls this the FTUE, the First-Time User Experience. You'll come to call it the Fuck-Time User Experience. Roll for initiative.

♪ The DM cues the music“Bohemian Rhapsody”, Queen Listen ↗ A confession to a mother, six minutes long. Hold on to that.

It's some summer of some year, and Mumbai is doing its summer thing: sitting on your chest and breathing its hot-ass breath on you.

There's a boy on the floor, four years old, and in front of him is the television. The television is ours, which is a polite way of saying it belongs to whoever outranks you. Eight people in a one-BHK in Kandivali, one box with a picture in it, and the picture is cricket, because my grandfather wants cricket and my uncle wants cricket and what a four year old wants is not an input the system accepts.

I fought for that television. Daily. Badly. Like a tiny, furious little shit. With zero leverage, which has never once stopped my dumb ass. I lost every single time, because the rule wasn't written down anywhere, and rules that aren't written down are the hardest ones to argue with. I'd love to tell you I learned some deep shit from that. What I actually learned was how to keep arguing. Every poor bastard who's ever managed me can confirm. Loudly.

The console wasn't ours at all. My father had a side hustle selling electronics, and a knock-off NES had come home as stock, waiting to be sold. Before it went, he showed it to me. He was the one playing first. I remember that part clearly... or I've decided I do. A grown man on the floor of a one-BHK working out the controls, and then handing the controller across to a four year old.

So there's a small man in red, running at a mushroom, and now it's me steering him. The boy doesn't know it's a mushroom. He doesn't know the man has a name, or a brother, or a job. He knows that when the man touches the thing, the man gets bigger, and bigger is better, and this is the first rule anyone has ever taught him that makes sense immediately.

He runs at the mushroom. He gets bigger. Behind him a fan is losing an argument with the room.

For the record, that was the first mushroom I ever took, and it's still the best one. It made me bigger, gave me an extra life, and only wore off when something hit me. The ones I met twenty years later never managed any of that. Say what you want about Nintendo, their pharmacology is way better balanced than the shit I found later.

My father says that somewhere in that summer I put the controller down and told him I was going to make Mario one day. Four years old, full sentence, delivered with the confidence of a man who's never been told no by a fucking bank.

I do not remember saying it. I remember the heat, and the floor, and the waiting, and the exact feeling of being small and then not being small, which I would spend the next thirty years trying to hand to other people without once calling it that. I do not remember the prophecy. I think he might be telling me a story he wishes were true, which is a generous thing for a father to do for a son who is about to have a hard time of it.

I have decided to keep it anyway.

The other thing I kept was the argument. I've been having it ever since, with teachers, with a CEO or two, with producers, with anyone who happened to be holding the remote and couldn't explain the rule they were holding it by. I have never once had it quietly. Not once. I've had it the way that boy played: at a sprint, taking the gap, missing the gap, going again, with the B button held down the whole damn time.

And I got good at that game. Then I got good at the levels outside it, which come in the same order: a thing you can't do, then a thing you can do, then a castle. I cleared castles. Exams, an entrance test, a loan, an internship, a job, a title, another title. And every time I got to the end of one, the same shit was waiting: the guy who looks like the final boss and isn't. A fake Bowser. You beat him, and some cheerful little person turns around and explains, very politely, that the princess is in another castle. And you say thank you. And you start walking. Because what the fuck else are you going to do?

The good thing about Mario? If the castle kicks your ass, you start the level again. If you're tired of starting the level again, you put the cartridge down and play something else, and Mario waits, and nothing that happened to you in there follows you out.

The bad thing about Mario? It's a video game, and my life is very much fucking not. There's no fucking restart. No checkpoint before the bad decision. No putting the cartridge down for a year and picking it up where you left off, because the level keeps running whether or not you're holding the controller. You only live once, and I've lived like a man who believes it, and I'd do most of it again.

But let me say the quiet part out loud, since we're being honest on page one. Sometimes YOLO sucks balls, man.

Fine. The princess.

Plot twist, and my wife would like this on the record: she was never the princess. She was never waiting at the end of a castle for anybody, thank you very fucking much. She was Player Two.

In the game, you save the princess. That's the whole deal: she waits at the end, you run, you arrive, the music plays. In my life it didn't go like that at all. On a night I'll tell you about later, I was the one at zero lives, and she was the one who walked up to the machine and put the coin in. That's what Player Two does. Nobody writes songs about it. Somebody fucking should.

I'm not going to embarrass her any further on page one, because she has to live with the rest of this book. And with me. Poor woman.

The princess turned up later, a lot of castles later, and she is my daughter.

So the prophecy was half right, which is better than most prophecies manage. I never made Mario. I did reach the princess, and it turns out she wasn't at the end of anything. She was the reason for the whole run. And I'm still walking to the next castle, still fairly sure the guy inside is a fake, still doing it without a save point. That's the whole shitshow, and I wouldn't give it back.

So how did the goddamn war over the television end?

Not with me winning it. I've spent a lot of my life telling the story of a fight like the fight was the point, so let's not do that here. One day, somewhere around 2002 or 2003, there was a second television in the bedroom, smaller than the first, and the argument just... stopped having anywhere to happen.

My mother bought it. She saved for it the way women of that generation saved: invisibly, out of money that was already promised to something else, and without mentioning it until the thing was in the house. Nobody sat me down and explained that the rule had changed. The rule hadn't changed. My grandfather still got the cricket. The rule just wasn't load-bearing anymore, because somebody had gone out and built a second room around it.

I think about that more than almost anything else I learned as a kid, and I didn't understand it for twenty years. When you can't win the argument, and you can't change the rule, and the person holding the remote is not going to be reasoned with, there's still one move left, and it's the expensive one. You go and make another place for the thing to live. Every good decision I've made since is some version of that. So is this book.

I got the small television. Years before it, I'd had a console that was only ever passing through the house on its way to a buyer, and that's how I met the mushroom in the first place.

What I didn't get, for a long time, was the other thing.

We ate well. That goes first, because my mother will read this, and because it is true. There was food in that house every single day, and it was hot, and there was enough of it, and the fact that I am about to tell you how it was made enough is not a complaint. It is just arithmetic, and I did not learn the arithmetic until much later.

I loved bhindi. Still do, it's one of my favourite sabzis of all time, and as a kid there was never enough of it to enjoy properly, which at eight or nine feels like a personal injustice with a name and a face. Bhindi costs money. Potatoes cost less. So the potatoes went in, cut small and fried properly so they carried the taste, and the bowl that was going to feed four fed eight, and nobody at that table had to be told anything. I ate a lot of aloo bhindi as a kid. I thought my mother loved potatoes.

I got scolded for eating too much. That's the other half of the arithmetic, and it took me the longest to get, because at that age you don't hear a budget, you hear a verdict on you. Eight people don't eat at the same time in a house like that. The people who cook eat last. What I heard was that I was greedy. What was actually being said was leave some for your grandmother.

Everything came in portions. One bowl of chhaas each. Grapes, when there were grapes, divided into shares. There was no breakfast in the mornings; that just wasn't a thing in our house. Dry fruits came once a year, at Diwali, and for the four days of Diwali each of us got one small cup of masala milk.

Around 1990, the year before I was born, my father's salary was about seven hundred and fifty rupees a month. Later, in the years I'm talking about, the house ran on seven or eight thousand, pieced together from his salary, a side business in imported goods, and whatever my grandfather and my uncle could chip in. Eight of us. I'm not going to dress that up with adjectives. The number does the work, and the people in this story didn't spend their evenings feeling poetic about it. They spent them doing the arithmetic.

There were Diwalis without new clothes. If you didn't grow up Hindu, or Indian, that sentence might not do anything to you, so let me translate. New clothes at Diwali isn't a treat. It's the baseline. It's what the whole street is wearing on the same evening, and everybody can see who's in last year's kurta, and nobody says a word, and everybody knows.

Something in me learned, around then, that food was a thing you had to be fast about, and that being full was a window that closed, and I carried that for the next twenty years in a body that kept the receipts. It took a very long time and a lot of help to unlearn. We will get to it. Not here, and not as a joke.

Here. Cricket's back on. Go do your homework.

I have to back up a little now, because the arithmetic I just described didn't come from nowhere.

It was December 1999. I was eight. My sister was four. My father worked at the Syringe Company, and he had been unhappy there for a long time. No satisfaction. No raise. Less and less work being handed to him. So one day he came home at a time that was not his time, and sat down, and did not have a job anymore. Nobody had fired him. He had walked out, with nothing else lined up.

I do not remember being told. Children are not told, they are downwind. What I remember is the weather changing in the rooms. Voices going quiet when I walked in and starting again in a different key when I left. My mother doing sums out loud that she used to do in her head.

It took about a year and a half to get his own work going, and when it came, in 2001, it was not a job anybody gave him. He built it himself.

My father was not lazy, and he was not unlucky in the way people mean when they say unlucky, which is usually a polite word for careless. He was a man whose skills had a shelf life nobody had warned him about. The work moved onto computers and he did not know computers, and there was no retraining scheme, no severance to buy time with, no LinkedIn to shout into. There was a man in a house with a four year old, an eight year old, and five other people who ate every day.

And he went dark. I am not going to use a clinical word for it, because nobody in that house used one, and putting one in now would be me tidying it up for you. He sat. He got quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the room. Some of it I saw. Most of it I have reconstructed since, from the way people still talk around those years.

There was other trouble in those months too. The kind with a police station in it, and money leaving a house that did not have any. That is all I am going to say about that.

It keeps repeating itself in my house in some way or the other.

My father walked away from a job that had stopped wanting him. I lost mine because a man in a cabin decided he was done with me. Different doors, same shape, same house, one generation apart. And both times, the guy it happened to was extremely sure, for a while, that it was a verdict on him.

It's not a verdict. It's weather. It took me another decade and a lot of expensive evenings to learn that, and I'm handing it to you here in the prologue for free, and you won't believe me either, and that's fine. I didn't believe it when someone tried to tell me. You have to stand in it. Get soaked. Catch a cold. Then you'll believe me.

The funny part, and there's always a funny part: the man who couldn't use a computer back then now forwards me four videos a day. Graduate, with honours, of WhatsApp Forward University. He sends me health advice invented by some random asshole with a ring light. I fact-check him. He sends another one. We've found our rhythm. It's beautiful. It's also exhausting as fuck.

While he was sitting, my mother went to work. Not in the way that phrase usually means. There was no office and no interview and no title at the end of it.

In early 2000, weeks after he left the job, she got a sewing machine. Seven hundred and fifty rupees. She didn't pay for it, not then. It came home first and got paid off later, the small kind of loan nobody puts in a story about loans. Then another seven hundred and fifty to have a motor fitted to it. It is still in that house, and it still works, which is more than I can say for most of what I've shipped.

And my mother started taking in other people's clothes.

Not making clothes. Mending them. A tear here, a seam gone, a hem that somebody's son had grown past, falls stitched onto sarees. Strangers' clothes, brought in at the door, gone back out looking like the damage never happened. Hold the picture: a woman at a machine, fixing things she did not break, for people whose names she did not always know, so that eight of us could eat, and so that some year the clothes at Diwali would be new.

Then she started making things too. Saree covers, and other covers like them, cut and stitched at the same machine.

She stitched other people's chaniyas too, the long petticoats that go under a saree. In the early years the whole thing brought in maybe ten thousand rupees a month, and five or six thousand of that was profit, and every bit of the labour was hers.

The stationery came later. It started when she was taking my sister to school. She sold it outside my school, and for a while she did both: the machine at home, and the bags at the gate.

She carried the bags herself. Pencils, erasers, sharpeners, scales, the small bright things that a child wants for reasons that have nothing to do with writing. She sold them to the mothers coming to collect their children, at the hour of the afternoon when Mumbai is at its least forgiving and the only shade is whatever you brought with you.

I stood there and watched other people's parents buy that stuff for their kids. The fancy sharpener with the barrel that catches the shavings. The eraser shaped like something. My mother was the one selling it, and I could not have any of it, because we could not afford the stock we were standing next to.

I do not have a tidy sentence for how that felt. I am not sure I had one at the time either. It was just the arrangement, the way the one television was the arrangement.

After the stationery came imitation jewellery, and after that undergarments, each one learned by watching what somebody else was selling. By the end she was bringing in forty thousand rupees a month.

I come from menders.

I didn't think about that sentence for thirty years, and then it fell on me in the middle of a meeting. I don't make games from nothing. I almost never have. I get handed a game somebody else built, torn in three places, and I'm asked to make it feel like it was always whole. Find the seam. Don't rip the whole garment apart to fix the hem. Leave it looking like the damage never happened. That's the job. That's been the job at every studio I've ever worked at, it's the thing I'm best at, and I learned it from a woman at a sewing machine in Kandivali before I could spell it.

There's a version of this book that turns that into a triumphant little speech. I'm not writing that version. At the time none of it felt like lineage. It felt like a lot of noise in a small flat, a machine going at odd hours, and a father who was very quiet.

The lineage only shows up later, when you look back and find that the thing you thought you invented was already in the house.

Act I · The Tutorial · Chapter One

The Outstanding Student

Side quest: school. Party size: one. Nobody else wanted to come. Roll for curiosity. You rolled a natural twenty. That's the fucking problem.

A wall full of charts. A long passage with a few benches to sit on. A murmur in the air, the low hum of a building full of classrooms all being taught something at the same time.

The chatter's picking up. The clock's about to strike four.

A few moments pass, and then... the bell. A huge one. The whole building turns into an echo chamber, literally, because acoustics, and figuratively, because it's a school. The chatter goes wild. The period is over.

And I can finally stop being an outstanding student.

Figuratively and literally. I was standing outside the class. As fucking usual.

This has been my problem my whole life, and it's probably just me. Whenever I ask questions, I get shut up. At school that meant being sent to stand outside the classroom. At work it means being asked to leave the meeting, which is the same corridor with better air conditioning. Once, it meant being re-levelled, which sounds like a promotion and isn't. It's a demotion that went to business school. Fancy as fuck.

Story of my damn life.

Standing there that evening, I remember thinking it couldn't get any worse. Years later, in The Simpsons Movie, Bart tells Homer it's the worst day of his life, and Homer, in the one piece of parenting in the whole franchise that holds up, corrects him: "The worst day of your life so far."

Those yellow bastards predict everything eventually. They predicted this too. There were worse days coming. Yeah.

But I don't want to open this chapter all sad and dramatic. I'm not miserable. Not actually miserable. Maybe my job sucks ass right now. Maybe. But I'm a thousand percent sure the boy standing outside that classroom would be proud of who I became.

That boy didn't get new clothes for Diwali, the one festival where every Indian kid is owed new clothes. He didn't get the pair of shoes he wanted.

The man has a wardrobe bigger than his wife's, and a shoe collection of a couple of dozen pairs and counting.

So yeah, it's shit in places. Then I remember it'll suck a lot less on the drive home, in my nice expensive car, with the ventilated seats cooling my butt. Ah. Bliss.

Anyway. Back to the damn corridor. Let me tell you how that boy kept ending up in it.

It was a government-aided school. Not the best crowd. I made zero friends there. Not a few. Zero. Zilch. Fuck all.

For a long time I wondered why, and I've narrowed it down to five theories, which, as any designer will tell you, is four more than a decision.

Theory one: they resented me for being smart.

Theory two: I liked that they resented me for being smart.

Theory three: I made them feel stupid. Possibly on purpose, because I was a little shit. See theory two.

Theory four: it was their insecurity, not mine. This is the theory I held the longest, which should tell you something about theory four.

Theory five showed up much later, after I'd sat on the other side of enough meetings: sometimes the curious kid is also exhausting as hell. The boy with his hand up again is a seeker of truth, sure. He's also the reason the period's running late and everybody wants to go home.

Which one's true? No fucking idea, man. I'm just assuming, and you know what happens when you assume: you make an ass out of you and me. Probably all of them, in different ratios on different days. I've decided not to pick.

What I did have, instead of friends, was a plan. I was going to build a warp drive.

An aeronautical engineer. A rocket scientist, or something close enough that nobody at a family function would know the difference. I wanted to design a warp drive, an engine that would let human beings travel across the galaxy. Not a better aeroplane. The fucking galaxy.

Where the warp drive came from, I couldn't tell you. Some cartoon. Jonny Quest, maybe? Or Ben 10, or some anime, or Gundam... It's been twenty years. I feel like the old lady in Titanic, for fuck's sake. It's been eighty-four years. I remember wanting the warp drive. I don't remember who gave me the idea.

It was even working, briefly. In tenth standard, the Maharashtra SSC board exams, the one exam every Indian parent has been waiting for since you were born, I scored around eighty-five percent in the prelims. The prelims are the rehearsal. In the real thing you usually do a few percent better.

Then, in the gap between the prelims and the finals, I discovered Counter-Strike 1.6.

Boy, oh boy. Holy shit.

I bunked school every day to go and play. I'd come home, kind of study, but not really, go and write the exam, and then sit there waiting for the clock to run out so I could leave as soon as humanly possible and go and play again. That was my board exam season. Headshots, not homework.

I paid for it by stealing money from my own house, to play at a cybercafe. Money my parents did not really have. I was stealing from a house that fried cheap potatoes into the bhindi so there would be enough to go around. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it, and I felt guilty, and I did it anyway. When I got caught, there were a lot of beatings at home.

It is one of the only things I have done in my life that I truly regret. My parents worked that hard, and I stole from them to play Counter-Strike, and I wrecked my exams doing it.

From eighty-five, I went to fifty-seven.

In Mumbai, school ends at tenth standard. Eleventh and twelfth are junior college, and only after that do you get to a degree college. So fifty-seven closed the very first door. No science college would take me. I could have gotten in by paying a donation, which is a very normal thing in India, but we could not pay a donation to any decent science college.

The warp drive stayed on the ground.

♪ The DM cues the music“Give Me Some Sunshine”, from 3 Idiots Listen ↗ Every Indian kid who ever sat a board exam knows why.

Then I played Mass Effect.

In Mass Effect there are mass relays, ancient machines scattered across the galaxy that fling you from one end of it to the other. Somewhere in there I had a thought I've never really stopped having. Maybe I didn't get to make a real warp drive. But one day I could make a game where one exists.

That's what games did for me, over and over. Real life kept closing doors, and games kept handing me whatever was behind them. I saved the princess in Mario when I was four. I saved the galaxy in Mass Effect. I defused bombs in Counter-Strike on days I should've been writing exams, which is also a kind of saving, if you squint really fucking hard. Years later I'd spend an entire night dying to the Pursuer in Dark Souls 2, go to sleep, and kill that bastard on the first try in the morning.

Games saved me. So did anime, and so did a few other things we'll get to. But games were first.

The dream didn't die. It changed mediums. Hold on to that.

So that's the outstanding student. The most outstanding in the whole school, standing outside because the teachers didn't like the questions, didn't like the curiosity. I get the same treatment at work now, and I've gotten it in a lot of other places in life. I ask hard questions, and people don't like me for it. And I don't know what to do about that. I really don't.

Remember theory five. People don't like hard questions.

And maybe that's me, too.

Act I · The Tutorial · Chapter Two

Welcome to the Industry

Tutorial complete. Or so you think. You've got a loan, a dream and absolutely no fucking idea what you're doing. The industry would now like to see your papers. Roll for employment.

The bet.

There's a school called DSK Supinfocom, and in 2010 it was the closest thing this country had to a place that would teach you to make games and treat that as a serious thing to want. To get in, you sat an entrance exam. To sit the entrance exam, you paid two and a half thousand rupees.

Hold that number next to the other numbers in this book so far. It isn't a lot of money. What matters is whose money it was, and what it was being spent on: a maybe.

And that wasn't even the first maybe. Before DSK there was an animation course. A whole year of it, two and a half lakh rupees of it, and I didn't even finish. I sucked. Maybe I just hadn't found my calling yet.

So, the DSK exam. I failed it. Badly. I sat that exam and it went through me like I wasn't even there. Absolutely fucking clowned.

So that was two and a half thousand rupees of a household that did arithmetic at the dinner table, spent on finding out that I wasn't, that year, good enough. Great fucking investment. Ten out of ten. Would lose again.

I went back the next year and got in. First rank. All over India, or at least that's what the lady on the phone told me, and I have chosen to believe her.

What changed? I prepared. Properly, this time. I studied games instead of just playing them, read more books, soaked up general knowledge like a sponge, and scoured Wikipedia and YouTube for anything that looked like it might come up. Turns out reloading works better when you actually change your loadout.

And then the bill arrived. Seventeen lakh rupees for the course.

I need to be careful here, because there's a way of telling this that makes me the hero of it, and I wasn't the hero of it. I was the expense.

Seventeen lakh came from a bank, and from relatives, and from my mother's gold, which went to sit in a locker belonging to people who were not us, as collateral. That was not something I discovered years later in some tearful reveal. I knew going in. It was said out loud, in the house, the way the rest of the arithmetic was said out loud. Everyone agreed. I said yes to it, at an age where you are not really qualified to say yes to anything.

A woman who spent years mending strangers' clothes so eight of us could eat put her gold in a bank so her son could learn to make cartoons that move.

It took until about 2017 to pay back, and not just by me. My parents carried a lot of it. They're still helping with things now, long past the point where that was supposed to be over.

People who've worked with me will tell you I'm relentlessly, annoyingly useful. I ship. I fix. I take the ugly problem nobody wants and I make it go away, fast, and I've built an entire professional identity out of being the guy you call when the build is on fucking fire. Everyone thinks that's a virtue. For most of my career, so did I.

It was a mortgage.

I did not walk into this industry as a young man chasing a dream. I walked in on day one already owing, with my mother's gold in somebody else's locker, and every single decision I made for the next ten years was made by a person who could not afford for it to not work out. Call it passion, call it hustle, whatever. It was a debt wearing the clothes of a work ethic, and it will let you win for years before you notice what it cost.

We'll come back to that.

First I have to get the job.

A note on names, since we're about to meet some employers. I'm not naming the studios I worked at, or the people who ran them. There's no lawsuit waiting. It's that the lesson in every one of these stories survives the name coming off, and if it doesn't survive that, it was never a lesson. It was a grudge with a nice haircut. So everybody gets a working title instead. You'll know exactly who I mean, and so will they, and nobody has to say it out loud.

First came the dog company. Enormous, American, named after somebody's actual bulldog, which tells you everything you need to know about that era. Peak 2012 bullshit, and I mean that fondly. An internship, the way it goes for everybody in that programme. Everybody except me, briefly, because I was the last person in my class to get one. Of course I fucking was.

And I didn't get it through some genius portfolio. I got it through DOTA. In my first year of college I'd met a guy playing the DOTA 2 beta, just some dude from the game, and he's the one who got me the interview.

I never once thought playing DOTA would get me a job. It's like the rune in the river: you have no idea if it's Haste, or Double Damage, or just an Illusion until you actually walk down there and look. I walked down there. It was Haste.

I'd love to tell you I was some quiet fucking prodigy whose genius got overlooked. Bro. I nearly flunked the fuck out. I got in late, I got in barely, and for a while it looked like I'd lose the thing before it even started, which would've been a very expensive way to discover I was shit at this, given who was funding the discovery.

Then they ran an internal hackathon. Five of us built a real-time multiplayer prototype for a new fight mode, and it came third.

Third. This is a book about game design, and game design people love a story where the underdog wins the jam. Nope. Fuck that movie. We came third, and third was enough, because the thing shipped. I designed the tutorial it launched with. Some of what I built in those days went into products that millions of people clicked on inside a Facebook tab at work in 2012, without ever once wondering who made the bit they were clicking. That's the job. You don't get a byline. You get to point at a screen at a family function and say, the clicking bit, that was me... and watch your uncle not give a shit.

That internship ended the way internships end. And then I got my first real offer, from a small studio in Mumbai that was about to be handed an entire pantheon, so let's call it the god company. One letter off the last one. Fourteen years of my life live in that gap and I only noticed while typing this sentence. Anyway. This is where it gets stupid as shit.

They offered me about twenty-five thousand rupees a month. I said, politely, that my internship had paid more than that.

The man across the table didn't believe me. Fair enough, from his side of the table: some kid with no shipped credit of his own, quoting a number higher than the one he's being offered, in a market where everybody inflates. So he said, show me the letter.

I had the letter. I opened the letter. The letter had somebody else's name on it too. Oh, shit.

The dog company's HR had done what HR does under volume: mashed two people's paperwork into one document and sent it out into the world without reading it. So there, right in the middle of my proof, was a senior colleague's name and package, sitting next to mine, turning my perfectly true claim into what looked exactly like a boy who'd photoshopped a stranger's salary and got greedy about it.

I've had a lot of bad meetings since. That one still gets the fucking medal. Gold. Possibly platinum.

I called HR. I'd like to say I opened with something professional. What I actually said was, bro, you fucked up. To their enormous credit they agreed in about four seconds, and a corrected letter went out from an official address to the man who thought I was a liar. That's the only kind of vindication that works, by the way. Not me explaining. Somebody else's letterhead explaining.

The deal we landed on was twenty-five thousand now, the difference paid after a three month probation, and thirty-five after that. Everybody shook hands. Everybody meant it. (Foreshadowing.)

I mention the numbers because they're small, and because nobody in this industry says them out loud, and a nineteen year old reading this deserves to know what the ground floor actually looked like for somebody who is now, apparently, a principal designer. Whatever the fuck that means.

Okay. I'm leaving the road for a minute. Fair warning: I'm writing this bit angry, and I've decided to keep it angry, because sanding it down would be a lie about how it feels to have been the twenty two year old in that paragraph and to watch what's being done to the ones arriving now.

What bothers me is that those numbers have barely moved since. Games cost more now. RAM costs more now, gloriously, absurdly, what-the-fuck more. Rent costs more, engines cost more, everything in the pipeline costs more. The one figure that's stayed roughly where it was in 2012 is the one offered to a twenty two year old for their first job in this industry.

And upstairs, in the room with the good chairs, the reasoning has recently become very sophisticated. It goes like this. AI do work. AI cheap. Why pay human. Man in tie smart. Man in tie get bonus.

The bit the man in the tie hasn't reached yet, because it's four quarters away and he's paid to see one: AI is a tool, not a fucking solution. It produces a confident, plausible, probabilistic shitshow at a speed no human can match, and somebody has to go in afterwards and work out which parts of it are true. That somebody is a person who spent five unglamorous years learning the difference. And you make one of those by hiring a junior and feeding them while they're useless. There is no other supply. You can't buy a senior. You can only have paid for one, earlier, in a year when it didn't look necessary. This isn't rocket science, man. I would know. I wanted to be a rocket scientist.

Given enough time, they say, a monkey with a typewriter will produce an epic. Sure. Probably true. Nobody ever mentions who has to read the nine million drafts that aren't the epic, and whether he was hired, and what the fuck he was paid.

Rant over. Apologies. Not for the content, which I stand behind and will say to a face, but for the detour, because you came here for a story about a boy and a television and I've just spent four paragraphs yelling at a man in a goddamn tie. Blah blah blah. I know. I'm done. Mostly.

I was in. I had a desk. I had a title that meant nothing and a game that was going to be enormous.

It was going to be fine.

Act I · The Tutorial · Chapter Two Point Five

Three Months (DLC)

The last chapter ended on "it was going to be fine," which isn't an ending. It's a fucking known issue. You're owed the rest of it.

So: downloadable content. Free, because you already paid for the base game, and because the part I left out is the part that actually happened. You're welcome, you freeloading bastard.

The god company had landed something enormous. A famous foreign publisher, the kind whose heroes all have improbable fucking hair and swords taller than they are, was doing its first proper project out of India, and we were it. A role playing game, on mobile, built out of our own mythology. Holy shit, right?

Picture what that sounded like to me at twenty two, in Mumbai, in that year. Our gods. Our stories. Not as flavour sprinkled over somebody else's fantasy kingdom. Ours. Load bearing. With that goddamn logo on the box. I'd have worked on it for free, and I nearly fucking did, if you divide what they paid me by the hours I put in.

My contribution was a thing I still like. Karma cards. Your class wasn't something you picked at the start and lived with; your class was a card. You equipped the card and became the thing. You could carry two, and you switched between them by shaking the phone, which in 2013, on the shitty phones people actually had in their hands, was one of the few gestures that felt like doing something instead of pressing something. Two classes, live, mid fight, in your palm, off a flick of the wrist. Fucking cool, right?

Nothing on mobile was doing that shit then. I've checked since, the way you check on an old idea at two in the morning when you can't sleep, and I still can't find the thing that beat us to it.

The game never shipped. That's the whole damn obituary. Two sentences, no more, because it deserves two loving sentences and because the rest of this chapter isn't about it.

What I did get from those months, and what I've used every year since, came from Waterfall Bhai, the developer who would not build anything.

Laziness I could have worked with. This was principle, and principle is worse. His position was that he could not begin until the design was finished. All of it. Every system, every edge case, signed and complete, and then he would build exactly that. Until then, nothing. Nada. Zilch. Jack shit. He said it the way people say things they've decided make them serious.

I was too junior to argue properly and too new to know I was allowed to. So I wrote the whole damn document. All of it. Every system, every edge case, for a game nobody had played a single second of.

You already know how that ends. Half of it was wrong. Not wrong because I was bad at the job, although, let's be real, I was pretty shit. Wrong the way any plan is wrong before it's touched a person. The parts that were going to feel great on paper were dust in the hand. The parts that felt like filler turned out to be the thing worth building. We found that out late, because we found out everything late, because nothing existed to find anything out with. Classic fucking waterfall.

That's where I learned the lesson that runs under most of what I believe now.

A design is a question. You can write the question beautifully. You still don't have the answer until somebody plays it.

So: my gods, my cards, my enormous bitch of a document, my logo on the box.

Not even three months in, they called me into a cabin.

Two men were in it. The Suit, who ran the place, and Senior Suit, who was his father and who sat slightly to one side and said nothing at all, the entire time, from beginning to end.

I was told they were letting me go.

I waited for the rest of the sentence. There is always a rest of the sentence. Performance, or budget, or the project changing shape, or a probation clause, or we like you but. Something you can hold. Something you can argue with, or at least take home and take apart.

There was no rest of the sentence.

I said I would get my things. I was told not to go back in. Somebody would bring them out.

So I stood outside the office and waited while an office boy, who had done nothing to anyone and looked like he wished he were anywhere else, carried my things out to me in front of people I had eaten lunch with for almost three months.

The outstanding student yet again. Standing outside. Years later and the same joke, told by a different institution, in a nicer building.

What I felt was stranger than the dramatic version. I did not feel humiliated, not right then. That came later, in the months, in waves, usually around four in the afternoon. In the moment I felt a kind of polite blankness. I remember thinking that I should say thank you, and I think I did say thank you, which is the detail I would most like to go back and edit.

The ride home was the strangest part. Mumbai did not do Mumbai that day. The road was clear, the whole way, no jam, no crawl, nothing. I got home in a time that would normally have been a small personal victory. I remember noticing that and having no reaction to it whatsoever, the way you notice a song playing in a shop.

I had my passport in a drawer at home. I had got it made days earlier, because a passport is what you get made when you have your first real job and a plan. I had told myself it was a sign. The industry was going to take me somewhere. That was the exact phrase in my head when I paid for it: this is a sign.

It was a sign. Thirteen years later I have still never had a job outside this country, and that passport has been used exactly once. We will get to both.

Three months. My first real job, on the game with our gods in it, and I had worked like a man paying off a loan, because I was one. I do not think I slept a full night in those three months. I never made it to the end of the probation. I remember the document. I remember the cards. I remember writing every edge case for a game nobody ever played.

And then a man in a cabin said one sentence, and his father said nothing, and it was over.

Nobody tells you this about being fired for the first time.

It is not the money, although it is the money. It is that the story you had been telling yourself, the one with the prophecy in it, gets taken out of your hands and read back to you by someone who did not find it convincing. You cannot argue with a verdict that has no reasoning attached. You can only stand outside a building with a box and wait for somebody to bring you the rest of your things.

I was twenty two. I went home.

I told my parents that evening. They were sad, and they were disappointed. When I asked them about it this year, they told me that in that moment they thought all of it had gone down the drain.

The gold was still in the bank.

♪ The DM cues the music“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, Green Day Listen ↗

What follows is about a year and a half, and I can tell you almost nothing about them in order.

That's the first honest thing to say about being out of work. It doesn't have a plot. It has a texture. Days that start at eleven and end at four in the morning, and the four in the morning isn't work, it's fucking DOTA, which at least has a scoreboard and tells you at the end whether you were any good. (Spoiler: often not. I was shit.)

I freelanced. Architectural visualisation, previz, whatever came through somebody who knew somebody. Walkthroughs of buildings that didn't exist yet, for builders who wanted the flat to look larger than the flat was going to be. I was, in a small and legal way, in the business of belief again. Okay, fine. Bullshit. Legal bullshit. I didn't notice that at the time. I was noticing the invoices.

I bought the machine I needed for that work with borrowed money. Some from my mother, some from my father, and some from the DOTA friend, the same guy who got me the interview at the dog company. A PC, 2013, mid range, nothing that would impress anyone.

I think about that every time I buy a graphics card now. There is a beast of a card in my desk today, and it cost more than my first two months of salary, and I bought it with my own money in an afternoon without asking anyone. It does not feel like winning. It feels like being on the other side of a transaction I was on the receiving end of once, and knowing exactly what the other side felt like.

My parents kept paying the loan. That is the fact I have to keep putting in front of you, because it is the fact that was in front of me every single one of those mornings. The gold was in the bank because of a course that got me a job that did not last three months.

I also wrote pitch decks. Whole ones. Startup ideas, game ideas, systems designed down to the economy, PDFs that exist somewhere on a drive I've carried through four laptops. Not one of them got built. Nobody who could build was going to work for a fired twenty two year old with a PDF. Would you? Hell no. I wouldn't either.

If I'd had today's tools then, I'd have built every one of those. Badly, probably. But built. That thought has been in me for more than a decade. Hold on to it.

The worst part of the dark months wasn't the money.

Unemployment is extremely boring. Grief at least moves. This just sits. You wake up with nothing that requires you, and the absence of requirement is the whole injury. Nobody is waiting for anything you make. Nobody is going to notice if today you don't. That's what four in the afternoon does to a person, and that's when it used to land on me, reliably, like a scheduled task.

I applied for things. Not as many as I should have, and I've thought about why for years. Partly because every application is a small invitation to be told no again by a form. Mostly because I had started to believe the verdict. If a man in a cabin can end you in one sentence with no reasons attached, the natural next thought is that he had reasons and simply spared you them.

A couple of months in, I did the most me thing possible, like the stubborn little shit I am. I stopped waiting for somebody to hire me and started building a game myself.

A first-person horror game. If you know Konami's P.T., that's the neighbourhood.

Turns out I could build. Badly, alone, but build.

That went on for over a year.

Nothing worked out. Not the funding, not the game. Another nail in the coffin.

Mostly, I wasted time. I wasted a lot of my life in those months. I also did things I was not sure I could do, like start a company, which was not really a company. It was a name I made up and not much else. I still have not built my own studio. That dream is still sitting there, unfulfilled.

Then there was the night on the floor.

Two in the morning, give or take. I had been drinking whatever I could afford, which was Royal Stag, or possibly Old Monk. I have tried to remember which and I cannot, and I have decided not to pick one for the sake of a cleaner sentence.

My father had sat with me earlier and had a couple. He had gone to sleep. The house was the kind of quiet that a small flat gets at that hour, which is not silence, it is other people breathing in the next room.

The room was the kitchen. We were still in the one-BHK, and there was no money for a bigger place, so my parents had turned the kitchen into a room for me. And then they had spent a lot of money on all my gaming gear to go in it.

I was on the floor. I said the thing out loud for the first time.

I do not think I am right for this industry.

I meant it. I wasn't complaining, and I wasn't fishing to be argued out of it. It was a finding. I had run the experiment and that was the result: the industry had looked at me for three months and returned a verdict with no reasoning attached, and the most rational explanation available at two in the morning with a glass in your hand is that the verdict was correct.

And then my mother came and sat down on the floor with me.

Not on a chair, not standing over me, not from the doorway. On the floor, at two in the morning, in a flat where she had been the one doing the arithmetic for twenty years. She put her hand on my head and stroked it while I cried, the full, ugly, twenty-three-year-old kind, and she said:

"Thai jaase, beta. Tu tension nai le."

It will happen, son. Don't you take the tension.

Her gold was in a bank. It had been in that bank for a while by then, and it stayed there for years after, because of a course that got me a job that did not last three months.

That is all I am going to write about that.

I have thought about putting something here. A line about what it costs a woman to say that sentence in that condition, or about the arithmetic between her words and her jewellery, and every version I write is me standing in front of my mother explaining her to you.

So instead, the facts, in order. She sat on the floor. She said it will happen. Her gold was in the bank. Make of that what you want; I have had eleven years and I am still making something of it.

What happened next is the least cinematic thing in this book.

I did not leap up changed. There was no montage. I woke up the next day with a hangover, opened my laptop, and updated my resume. Then I went on Naukri, and Monster, and a LinkedIn that nobody in this country was taking seriously yet, and I applied for things.

That is what recovery looked like. A Word document and a headache.

I want the Fresh Spawn reading this to have that, because the version you get told is always the night. The night is the good story. The night is not what got me out. What got me out was a very boring morning, and then another one, and then a couple of months of those.

The job came in April 2015, about a year and a half after the cabin. I'm calling the place the doodle company, because the game we were making looked like it had been drawn in the back pages of a school notebook. A real desk, a salary that arrived on a date. Like a real fucking adult.

My boss there was a woman, and she was one of the good ones. She didn't make speeches about it. She was just steadily, unremarkably supportive, in the way that only registers later, when you've had the other kind and can tell the difference. After the cabin, that was the entire medicine.

Field note, kept for over a decade and stated without a defence: most of the best working relationships of my career have been with women leads. Less ego in the room, more attention on the problem. I have theories. None of them are solid enough to print. Yet.

I found out the rest much later, at the doodle company. We were showing our game at Comic Con, and I got talking to a guy who had worked with the famous foreign publisher back when it partnered with the god company. That's how I heard. The publisher had pulled out. Our gods, our cards, the whole thing, gone, and this time not just for me.

I have chosen to believe it was because they fired me.

I've got no evidence. None. Zero. I'm aware that a studio losing a publisher has roughly nine hundred more likely causes than the removal of one twenty two year old designer three months into his first job. I know how that shit sounds. I'm a grown man with a mortgage-sized fucking opinion of my own importance and I've decided to keep the story anyway. Petty? Absolutely. Do I give a shit? Not even a little. HAHAHA.

You've seen me do this before, in the Prologue, with a four year old and a mushroom and a prophecy that probably never happened.

That's the whole trick, and it's the only thing in this chapter I'd actually recommend to anybody. At some point you'll be handed a verdict with no reasoning attached, by a cabin or a market or a form, and you'll be free to choose what story you tell yourself about it. Pick the one that gets you to the next morning. The useful one, even when it isn't the flattering one. The players who keep playing are almost never the ones holding the evidence.

One more thing, and then I'll let you out of this damn chapter.

Nobody taught me any of this. No senior sat me down after the cabin and explained that it was weather. No mentor looked at my enormous useless design document and told me which half was going to be wrong. I learned it by walking into the wall, and then walking into it again, and eventually noticing the shape of the fucking wall.

I turned out fine, and I'm still angry about it, and both of those are true at the same time. That anger turned into a teaching habit, and an occasional problem in meetings. Ask my team. Actually... don't.

For now: dawn, a resume, a Word document, a headache, a desk with my name on nothing.

The box was never real. The shitshow absolutely was. And so, it turned out, was I.

Act I · The Tutorial · Chapter Three

The Glass Ceiling Comes With a Visa

Loading. Last time you left with a résumé and a desk with your name on nothing. Now you get to send that résumé to every studio whose games you ever loved. Roll for... actually, don't bother. The fucking dice aren't plugged into anything.

While I was writing this chapter, I opened my email and typed “regret to inform” into the search bar.

Then “not selected.” Then “unfortunately,” because that word has never once in human history been followed by anything but bullshit. Then every other polite way a company has found to say no without technically saying no.

I didn't finish counting. I didn't need to. It's well over two hundred. Two hundred and something emails, collected over the years, sitting in my inbox like a shitty trophy cabinet nobody asked me to build.

The most recent one is three weeks old. LMAO.

Most of them are from studios outside India, and that part isn't a mystery. There are only so many studios in India to begin with, and the games I grew up on, the ones that made me want to do this in the first place, get made somewhere else. So you apply somewhere else. Over and over. For years, like a damn idiot.

That's a real one, by the way, word for word, minus the studio's name. Despite of my impressive CV and excellent qualifications. So close, bro. Impressive AND excellent, and still no.

And that “keep your application in our files” line is in almost every one of them. I believed that shit the first twenty times, man. I pictured an actual file, with my name on the tab, in a drawer somewhere in Montréal or Tokyo, and one day a producer with a deadline pulls it out and goes, “Wait. What about this guy?”

Nobody has ever called from the file. Not one fucking studio, not once. Somewhere out there is the biggest filing cabinet in the history of the games industry, full of people like me, and the future openings have never opened.

And those are the studios that bothered to write back.

A whole other pile never sent anything at all. You apply, you wait, and the silence just... becomes the answer. At least the template has the decency to be a template. Ghosting doesn't even give you something to be angry at. You end up angry at an inbox. Great fucking use of an evening, bro.

So, the real number. Across all those years and all those applications, I've had three, maybe four, actual interviews. Three or four! Out of two hundred-plus nos and God knows how many silences. That's a drop rate that would get a gacha game banned in Belgium.

♪ The DM cues the music“In the End”, Linkin Park (2000) Listen ↗ One of the first English songs I ever loved. Still playing it. Still applying.

Two of them went long. Over a month each. The first was a golf game, around 2019. The second was a senior designer role on an RPG, around 2022. Round after round, weeks of it, long enough that you start doing the thing you promised yourself you wouldn't do, which is imagining the damn commute.

And then, both times, the email. They'd regrettably decided to close the position.

They didn't go with someone else. They didn't hire anyone. They looked at the role, looked at me for over a month, and decided the best candidate was the empty chair.

I know that isn't what it means. Positions close for a hundred reasons. Budgets move, a project gets canned, a producer changes their mind on a Tuesday. I've been in this industry long enough to know all of that shit. It still reads the same way from the outside. The fucking chair won. Twice.

The other one was for a very famous match-three game about candy. I hadn't worked enough in casual, apparently. Relevant category strikes again. These days a designer's expected to do design, product, production, fucking everything, and still have exactly the right kind of everything.

If you've tried to do this from where I'm sitting, you already know why. It's the loop.

To get a job on a AAA game, you need AAA experience. To get AAA experience, you need a job on a AAA game. That's it. That's the whole bullshit trap. It's a quest you have to be level thirty to accept, in the only zone where you can earn the XP to reach level thirty.

And it isn't even one catch, it's two, facing each other like the mirrors in a lift, so you can watch yourself get rejected into infinity.

Apply for a junior role, and I'm too experienced. Which, fair. I've been doing this for fourteen years, and no studio wants a junior who's going to argue with the lead about the reward curve in week one. And I would. Obviously. I'm that asshole.

So apply for a senior role, and suddenly I don't have enough experience. Not enough experience “in the relevant category.” I've spent a long time trying to work out what the relevant category is, and as far as I can tell, it's the category of people who've already done the job. Hell of a category to get into from the outside.

Too much for the bottom rung. The wrong kind for the top one. And no middle rung, because the middle rung is where you'd earn the right kind, and the middle rung is also asking for AAA experience.

It's always a catch-22. Always. What a bitch of a loop. I've stopped being surprised by it, the way you stop being surprised by the rain in Mumbai in July. You keep a spare shirt at the office and you get on with it.

I really want to work on so many of the games I have played over the years. On them. And it feels almost impossible. As a designer there are fewer openings to begin with, and fewer still that will look past a border.

I do not know if it is bias, or racism, or nationality, or just plain bad luck. I have gone back and forth on it for years and I do not have an answer, and I am not going to pretend I do.

I want to learn. I want to be a better designer. I want to work with the greats. I do not know how.

If I wanted to go to Japan and work there, I would need to learn Japanese. That is not impossible. I know people who made it, designers specifically, who went abroad and got in. But I know so many more who tried and could not. Maybe they did not try hard enough. Maybe it was circumstances. Maybe it was a skill issue. From the outside you cannot tell which.

It is disheartening. That is the honest word for it.

The closest I've got to working with the greats is a shelf, a Steam library I never seem to finish, a bunch of GDC videos, and hopes and dreams.

The shelf first. Fifteen or twenty books, and counting. RPG handbooks, tabletop rulebooks, UX, art, programming, all kinds of game development stuff, and a whole damn lot of game design. What's missing from it is an award. Someday. Definitely.

I started collecting those books in 2013, and every one of them came through my father's business.

And yes, before anybody emails me: they were pirated. Every single one.

And it's not just the books. Games, movies, music, you name it, I've pirated it. I was one of the first of my friends to figure out what peer-to-peer meant. I learned that seeding has fuck all to do with farming, and that leeches aren't just the little bastards that suck your blood. Some of them are just a guy with a slow connection and no intention of giving anything back.

All of this on dial-up first, and then a fucking 128 kbps connection. By the time I got to 1 Mbps, it was already 2011.

Gaming wasn't something you could just walk in and buy, not where I grew up. No place to buy games. No money to buy them with. Not even pocket money. You've already seen the arithmetic in that house. So I pirated. Of course I fucking pirated.

I've bought most of them since. Not all. Some publishers can't be bothered to sell their older games anywhere, so, sorry, not sorry. And some of those games were genuinely bad, so I didn't bother. I think of those as an extended demo. Same way EAvil Corp thinks of loot boxes as “surprise mechanics.” Surprise, motherfucker. Ohh, the dragon sickness!

Anyway, enough of my rambling.

If you wrote one of those books, or made one of those games, I owe you. And I know exactly how that sounds coming from a guy who bitches about how little this industry pays as much as I do. I'm a hypocrite. A well-read fucking hypocrite.

I'm not sorry I pirated. I just wish I hadn't had to. I wish things had been simpler, and life had been easier.

Now I'm thirty-five, and I've gone from broke to Brôqué. Fancy as fuck. Accents and everything. It means I have money now, just never enough for anything real. Too broke for a fucking house. And I own a massive library across Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, GOG, and whatever other shit was on sale.

What I don't have is time to play any of it, because the crunch never fucking ends. Money for games, finally. Time for games, zero.

Saala, ye dukh kahe khatam nahi hota be?

Damn it, why does this misery never end?

The books helped me a lot, though. They gave me perspective, and a way to listen to people who'd shipped the games I loved talk about how they actually made them.

That business is older than the books. In 2001, after about a year and a half of getting it off the ground, my father started it. I was nine or ten. He became the man in the middle. Somebody needed visiting cards, or letterheads, or envelopes, or a stack of office stationery. He took the order, found a press that would do the job, and made a little on top. It was not a lot of margin. It was never a lot of margin. For the first few years he ran it on other people's paperwork, until 2004, when he got his own sales tax registration.

And then he delivered it. Himself. Heavy boxes of paper, on Mumbai's public transport, in Mumbai's heat, from the press to wherever the customer happened to be.

It got easier, slowly. The business grew. Years later there were delivery services like Porter and WeFast, and more and more of it could be done on a phone call. For a long time, though, it was him and the boxes.

It was years before I noticed what his business had been teaching me the whole time.

Think about what he actually did. A customer knows exactly what they want: this card, this font, this paper, five hundred of them. That's a spec. The spec is complete. It fits on one sheet. So it can travel. It can go from the customer to my father to a press across the city, and nobody needs to trust anybody very much, because the thing on the paper is the whole job.

Now look at how games get made across borders. Art crosses. A studio in one country sends a spec, a team in another country sends back the models, and it works, and good for them, those are real jobs and real chances for artists here to touch AAA. Code crosses too. QA crosses at huge scale; there are enormous QA teams sitting in India right now.

Design doesn't cross. Design is the thing that writes the spec. It's the part of the job that isn't on the paper yet, where somebody has to sit in the room and argue about why the jump feels like shit. A studio doesn't send that across the world to someone it has never shared a room with. Nobody's being evil, you know? Design runs on trust, and trust is the one thing that doesn't fit in the delivery box.

That's the ceiling. It's glass because you can see straight through it. You can see every studio, every game, every job listing. You just can't get your damn hands on any of it.

I did get through once. Sort of.

In August 2021 I joined a studio in Vietnam as a lead game designer. I'm calling it the cog company, because the dog company and the god company clearly needed a little brother, and because it rhymes, and because I'm a fucking child. I worked for them from India, remotely, for about a year and a half. A studio in another country, trusting a designer it had never shared a room with. The exact thing I just spent a page telling you doesn't happen.

It happened. For a while.

The plan was for me to move there. They wanted me there, and I wanted to go.

On 26 January 2023, Player Two and I got married. On the same day, my father fell ill.

I decided to stay.

In February, I was laid off.

I do not know why. It may have been my performance. It may have been my skill. It may have been that I did not move there, the way they wanted me to. Nobody told me, and I have not been able to work it out on my own. I am still not sure.

Okay. Deep breath. Let me tell you about Clair Obscur.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came out in April 2025. It was the first game from Sandfall Interactive, a studio in Montpellier, in the south of France, founded in 2020, with a core team of around thirty people. Thirty! That's not a studio, bro, that's a fucking strike team.

They found their composer, Lorien Testard, because he'd been posting his music on SoundCloud. Their lead writer came in through an audition call for voice actors that went up on Reddit. People nobody in the industry had heard of, on the biggest game of the year, because somebody bothered to look.

In December 2025 it won Game of the Year at The Game Awards. Nine awards that night, the most any game has ever taken home there, and the first debut game ever to win the big one. A first game. From thirty people. Holy shit.

I loved it. It has heart. You can feel, in every corner of it, that it wasn't made by a committee.

That's the crack in the glass. It's small, but it's there. Heart is the one resource where a designer in India competes at par with anybody on the planet. You can't outsource it, and no gatekeeping asshole can take it off you either.

♪ The DM cues the music“Sadda Haq”, A.R. Rahman and Mohit Chauhan, from Rockstar (2011) Listen ↗ The title means “our right.” Play it loud.

So I've decided something. This book is my cover letter.

No buzzwords. No template. No bullshit. No “I am writing to express my interest in the position of.” Just a guy telling you everything he knows about making games, how he learned it, and what it cost, for as many pages as it takes.

The best thing about a cover letter in a book is that it can't be rejected. There's no inbox for it to die in. Nobody can regret to inform it of anything. It just sits there, on a shelf or in a browser tab, and waits, and it's a hell of a lot more patient than I am.

To every studio that never wrote back: no hard feelings. Honestly. Your shitty filters were doing their job. Their job was just never to find people like me.

And to id Software, specifically: hi. I would like to work on DOOM. You know where to find me. I'll figure out the visa. How hard can it be? (Don't fucking answer that.)

♪ The DM cues the music“Sindbad the Sailor”, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, from Rock On!! (2008) Listen ↗ A sailor who sets out anyway, after everyone tells him the sea has nothing for him.

Remember the second television, back in the Prologue? When you can't win the argument, and you can't change the rule, there's still one move left, and it's the expensive one. You go and build another place for the thing to live.

I don't want to blame anyone for any of this. I mean that. I'm just a frustrated boy who wants to work on DOOM, and nobody will let me.

So I'm going to make my own DOOM.

With blackjack. And hookers. (Thank you, Bender.)

If the wall ever opens, I'll walk through it, obviously. If it doesn't, fine. I'll be busy building the damn room nobody invited me into.

Patch note: dependency on permission, removed.

Act I · The Tutorial · Chapter Four

The Box Isn't Real

Loading. A few chapters of rules, and you've been good about all of them. That ends here. Put your dice down, they were never plugged into anything anyway.

Yes, yes, I know. The chapter's name is the same as the book's name. I was feeling lazy as fuck. Or maybe you're putting me in a box that doesn't exist. Because the box isn't real, right?

Or maybe you've seen this shitshow so many times, been through those shit-stained realities where you're just there while other people hold the remotes, that you expected this book to give you the sense of direction life hasn't. Or maybe this is the chapter that tells you why I wrote this book in the first place.

My whole goal with Act I is to help you understand who I am. Until you get into my headspace, it's going to be hard to see why I'm even rambling about game design. That's why Act I is the Tutorial. You're still learning the controls. The controls are me. Sorry.

Or. Or. Or.

I'm just a thirty-five-year-old man having a midlife Crysis, because what I expected and hoped for from life isn't what's happening in it. At the end of the day, even after all the supposed success I've had, I still feel empty and hollow as fuck, and I still feel like I've done fucking nothing. I still feel like I'm in the box. With this book, I'm hoping to make it true that the box isn't real, and that I'm good at something. I know I am. But sometimes I don't. That's the imposter syndrome you'll come to know.

After all, I'm only human.

♪ The DM cues the music“Human”, Rag'n'Bone Man Listen ↗ Only human, as the man says.

And you know what else is human, except Salman Bhai? Anger. Pride. Maybe even some Envy...

I'm in a meeting. A few people from my team are there, and so is the new hire with the big title. Some people in the building think they've earned it. In my eyes, not so much. Could be cognitive bias, or could be I just know what shit smells like. Either way, I wasn't fucking convinced. They've been in the job long enough to have opinions and not nearly long enough to have been wrong about any of them yet.

I have an Elo rule for meeting new people. Nobody starts at zero. I give you a baseline and some time to set your own rating, so everybody gets the benefit of the doubt. This person just felt like someone who thinks they know better, and because I'm the outstanding student I've always been, I couldn't convince anyone otherwise. Sometimes it's hard as hell being a polar bear on thin ice.

The argument was about how something should be presented in the game. A dumb-as-shit decision, honestly. We'll get to it in Act II. It doesn't matter here.

I'm making my case. I'm making it well, too, fourteen damn years of well, and I can feel it landing on absolutely nothing.

Sitting in that room, I wonder what the point of the discussion even was. When the other person has no respect left for you, for whatever reason, you stop being a colleague. To them I'm an old man yelling at a cloud. I'm Jon Snow, because I know nothing. I'm a wall making sounds.

It stings because of a thing I do. I speak my mind, and I speak it too bluntly. To most people that comes off as a dick move. The people who've known me for a long time say they know how I am and that it's okay. Sometimes I suspect they're only fucking pretending.

There's that fucking imposter syndrome again. It's been a big part of my whole career.

Have you ever argued with a wall while standing in shit? Because that's the closest I can get you. The wall doesn't budge. It doesn't even have the decency to push back. And the shit sticks, man. It gets on your shoes, your sleeves, your whole fucking afternoon, and you keep talking anyway, because some stubborn little guy inside you is certain that if you just find the right sentence, the wall will turn around and say, "Oh. You're right. I'm so sorry."

It is not going to say that. It is a wall.

And to them, I'm the wall. Two walls, one room, nobody moving.

And sitting there, mid-sentence, with a few of my own people watching me do it, I just wanted to kill myself.

Figuratively, of course. Relax. Don't worry. You are going to have the pleasure of enduring me for a long, long time. I'm planning to vindicate my know-it-all-ness with an epic game someday, and then stand on the stage at The Game Awards, or whatever big show they're running by then, and shout "fuck the Oscars" into a microphone. I'm probably, definitely, sixty percent sure I'll be invited. Totally fucking sure.

(Foreshadowing.)

But that was the moment. Right there, in a chair, in a meeting I've already mostly forgotten.

Because somewhere in the middle of that sentence, I heard myself. I wasn't trying to fix the game. I wasn't even trying to fix the feature. I was trying to get a person to tell me I was right. I was spending my one limited supply of give-a-fuck on vindication, on a wall, and calling it design.

And I asked myself the dumbest, simplest question of my career. Why am I putting myself in this box?

There was a box, see. I built it myself, in real time, out of one argument and one person's face. The box said: the only way out is for them to agree. And I'd walked into it and sat down and started negotiating with the walls.

Nobody locked the door. There wasn't a door. There wasn't a box.

There's a thing I say now, and I'm going to keep saying it until somebody puts it on my tombstone: the box isn't real.

By the end of that meeting I was just exasperated. And I realised this isn't for me anymore.

Not because of that one person. Because of what games have become. Don't get me wrong, I like money as much as the next guy. But sometimes it feels like money is the only point left in video games, and like all of us, as a society, have gone creatively bankrupt. Yes, there are specks of creative spark here and there. You're one of them. You're definitely going to have your own creative spark someday. But the way we work as an industry very, very, very rarely feeds those sparks and helps them grow, and that's a huge fucking loss.

So yeah, man. I sat there and thought: I don't want to play this game anymore. It's getting too damn toxic for me. And it isn't about the company, or the person I was arguing with, or anyone at all. It's about where I am right now, and this isn't where I want to be.

It's not that I want absolute power, or the final call. It's that I'm stuck in the box, and it's very hard to be heard from inside a box. So I wanted to open it up. Open myself up, and speak out into the world. Maybe somebody out there will listen.

Because a creative spark can start a fire. And a fire can turn all the sadness to ashes. Maybe not for everyone around the world, but for one player at a time, even for a single moment. That's why you should keep doing what you're doing. That's why you make games: so people like you and me don't just get by. So people like you and me have somewhere to fly.

I'm a poet and I didn't even ask ChatGPT. I simply spoke, and the words arranged themselves into a rhyme, as they occasionally do for a man of my gifts. (Thank you, Captain Holt.)

What I walked out with wasn't anger, though. It was the feeling that I've reached a stage in my life where I can't articulate what I want to say. Maybe people don't get me. Or maybe it's my fault, and I'm doing it wrong. Fuck if I know.

That's partly what this book is. It's me trying to work out what I'm doing wrong and how to do it better. Maybe I'll find it by the last page. Maybe I won't. But the only thing worse than failing is not trying, so I'm going to keep trying.

That's the human thing again. You keep going until you succeed, because until you try, there is no success, and failure is just another stepping stone. You only ever see other people's successes. You never see the failures.

It's what makes games fun, too. A game that stays easy gets boring as shit after a while. A hard one, once you beat it, is so much better. That's the coolest part of being a designer: you get to make somebody else's life more fun.

Which takes me back to my first day of college.

A room full of green faces, all of us there to find out what game design even was. Some of us had gone straight into the advanced course. A few had come up from the basic one. I was straight into advanced. Obviously. Outstanding student. Then our professor walked in, looked at all of us, and asked: "Do you think life is a game?"

For most of us, it was the first time we'd dealt with a white professor, somebody who'd been in the game industry for that long. So everyone was thinking the same thing: okay, what do we answer here? And what I was thinking was the old Hindi line: Zindagi hai ek jua. Life is a gamble. And gambling is basically games. (Unfortunately, real-money online games are banned in India now.)

The thing about gambling is, the casino always fucking wins. The casino has the remote. The remote, unfortunately, is seldom in your hands. And when it is, it's usually when the battery's almost dead.

So we said yeah. I guess.

And he said: "If life is a game, then God is a game designer."

It clicked for me instantly. It still does. The DM of a game is its god. They can do whatever they want. They can make life miserable for the player, or fun for the player, and they can make them feel a hundred different things, because fun isn't one thing. Fun is a mix of emotions, and the tuning and balancing of them changes with what you're trying to make. That's why I still think life is a game and God is a game designer.

But the god doesn't get to be just any god. The game decides that.

If I'm making something like Death Stranding, I can't be a god who's trying to kill my player. That's not the job. I have to be the kind of god who helps them feel things. Loneliness first, walking across all that empty country with a mountain of boxes on your back. Literally boxes. A whole game about a man carrying boxes, and I'm over here writing a book about how they aren't real. The universe has a shitty sense of humour. Then connection. Then, somehow, feeling good.

If I'm making Dark Souls, different god. That god wants you dead, repeatedly, and wants you to thank him for it. And you do. I did. "Prepare to Die," right there on the box, and I bought it anyway, like a damn idiot, and loved every fucking minute of dying.

If I'm making a cricket game, I'm a god whose whole job is to make a kid somewhere in a gully feel like they're the Master Blaster.

Same power, every time. Completely different god. The game tells you which one you're allowed to be, and a good designer listens. A bad one just plays god with whatever mood they walked in with that morning. I've worked with both kinds. I've been both kinds. Not proud of the second one.

Funny as hell, coming from an atheist. I still want to think of myself as all-powerful when I'm making video games. And that superiority complex plays directly against the imposter syndrome, and the two of them fight it out in my head. The foot in my mouth doesn't help one damn bit. It's hard to be completely confident and completely doubt yourself about every single decision, at the same time.

It's very fucking hard.

I say the box isn't real. This whole damn book says it. And yet I keep finding myself inside other people's boxes.

♪ The DM cues the music“Numb”, Linkin Park (2003) Listen ↗ Tired of being what everybody else needs you to be. Put it on loud.

A game is a box too, obviously. But in a game the rules are clear, at least most of the time. You know how you win, what you can do, what you can't. Sometimes it's frustrating as hell, but you're frustrated because you know exactly what's going on, and some of it just isn't yours to control.

Dirty little secret of my job: you think you're controlling the game. The game is controlling you.

Every choice you make in a game was on a menu somebody like me wrote first. You feel free. You're running around, picking dialogue options, choosing which door to open, and it feels like you're doing what you want. It's smoke and mirrors. You can't do a single thing the designer didn't allow. Mario can't pick up the goddamn pipe. He can't have a quiet word with Bowser and sort it out over chai. He can jump, and run, and throw a fireball when I say he's earned one, and that's it. That's the whole universe.

And every gamer has hit an invisible wall. A perfectly open field, sky, grass, a mountain in the distance, and you just... stop. Your character runs on the spot like an idiot. The game says no, and it doesn't even tell you why. Or the doors. Half the doors in any game are just painted on. You can't open them. You were never going to. There's a whole game, The Stanley Parable, built around a narrator telling you where to go, and you deciding whether to listen. And even when you disobey him, somebody already wrote the disobeying.

And the wild part is, I don't think that's a bad thing. That's the craft. A game is a box with walls, and the walls are the fun. Chess is fun because the bishop can only move diagonally. Take the rule away and it's just a bunch of expensive little fucking statues.

I haven't fully worked out this idea yet, honestly. There's something in it about how control flows both ways, and I'll keep chewing on it for the rest of the book. But I know this much. The walls of a game are honest. You can see them. Somebody wrote them down, and you agreed to them the second you pressed Start.

The boxes other people build for you inside their heads are a different bitch entirely. You don't know what they're thinking. You don't know the rules. The rules are made up, and nobody shows you the rulebook.

I've been in so many of these. At school I was the kid who asked too many questions, so I was the problem, and I got sent to stand outside. Later, in the same damn week, one studio told me I was too senior and another told me I wasn't senior enough. Wrong passport, wrong city, wrong tone of voice in a meeting. Every one of those boxes had rules. I just never got to read them. I found out what they were by walking into them, face first, like a moth that thinks the window is the sky.

And you can't even rage-quit. That's the worst part. In a game, when the rules are bullshit, you close the game. In real life the game just keeps running in the background, with your name in it, and people keep playing it without you.

And the consequences. In a game you die and you restart. The real world is as roguelike as it gets. You fuck up, you're done. In Dark Souls, when you die, you can at least walk back to your bloodstain and pick up what you dropped. Once. Real life doesn't leave a bloodstain. Some shitstains, for sure. And there's no F5 either. I've quicksaved before so many conversations in my head, and not once has it fucking loaded. First impression is the last impression, and all those other fancy sayings.

It's extremely hard to change the box other people put you in. Nexus Mods can't help you here. There's no mod for this shit. No way out.

So, fine. I'll admit it. "The box isn't real" is less a fact than a hope. I want the goddamn boxes of judgement to stop existing.

And the other boxes, the games, aren't real either, in the good way. They're just fun. A game isn't judging you as a person. It's judging your skill, and it's obvious how to get better, and whether you even want to. Suck at DOTA? Suck at Valorant? Suck at whatever the fuck else? Quit. Move on to something else. Nobody writes it on your file.

The older I get, the more I understand that some battles aren't worth fighting. It reminds me of the Emu War.

You can do whatever you want, but sometimes nature just can't be beaten. In Australia it was Mother Nature. In the real world, it's the nature of other people. You don't beat it.

And I'm stubborn as shit. As much as I like to think I can adapt, I don't want to bend to somebody else's will, and that's a big part of why I keep ending up in shitty times.

I wish I could tell you this book is going to teach you how to manage people better, or manage your career better. Honestly? It's mostly me yelling at a cloud, and wanting the box to not be real.

Anyway. Back to video games. If Sony gets its way, there won't even be physical boxes anymore. LMAO.

But there's hope in other places. Start putting yourself first. You'll be happier. And I don't only mean your personal life. At work, too, think of yourself as the player. Not you the person, you the player of the game you're making. Is this the right direction for it? Is it fun for me? What's the fun in it?

Because finding the fun is basically the whole job description. There could be five hundred lines in the JD, but if you can't make a game somebody enjoys for five hundred seconds, what's the fucking point?

And it runs both ways. If you didn't have fun making it, they won't have fun playing it. I really believe that. You can feel it in a game, man. You can feel when a team was having a good time, and you can feel when a game was made by tired, scared people who just wanted it off their plate.

It's part of why I'm writing this book the way I'm writing it. The swearing, the fake achievements, the Fun Facts in Comic Sans, the whole DM bullshit. I'm having fun making it. So maybe you'll have fun reading it. That's the bet.

Now flip it. The next time you're playing a game and you're not having any fun, think about the people who made it. It probably wasn't fun for them either. With the layoffs that keep happening across the world every fucking day, people are losing their livelihoods, sometimes right after shipping the thing. It's a brutal fucking industry right now, and a lot of it is capitalism and shareholder politics, and none of it ends up anywhere near the fun.

So be nice to the credits. Somebody in there had a very shitty year.

I know, I know. I just spent half a chapter telling you I can't get out of other people's boxes, and now I'm about to tell you to rule yours. Contradiction? Abso-fucking-lutely. Welcome to my head. It's a shitshow in here, and the rent's cheap.

But the way I see it, there are boxes you can't break, and there's the box you keep climbing back into by yourself. I can't change what the new hire with the big title thinks of me. I can't make a studio in Montréal read my file. What I can change is whether I sit in that meeting begging a wall for a verdict, or get up and go build something.

So, one more time, for the people at the back.

Don't let the box do things to you. You do things to the box. It's there to tell you, hey, this is the box, now do with it what you will. You are the person making the rules for the game of this world. So why are you letting the rules rule you?

You're the ruler.

And if you're the one writing the rules, write something fun.

Because if it's not fun...

Post-Credits

The Soundtrack

A good DM plays music under the narration. These are the songs this book is written to. No lyrics printed, because lawyers, but every one of them is a click away.

Already playing

• “Bohemian Rhapsody” Listen ↗Queen · Prologue
• “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” Listen ↗Green Day · Chapter 2.5
• “Give Me Some Sunshine” Listen ↗from 3 Idiots (2009) · Chapter 1
• “In the End” Listen ↗Linkin Park (2000) · Chapter 3
• “Sadda Haq” Listen ↗A.R. Rahman and Mohit Chauhan, from Rockstar (2011) · Chapter 3
• “Sindbad the Sailor” Listen ↗Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, from Rock On!! (2008) · Chapter 3
• “Allah Ke Bande” Listen ↗Kailash Kher, from Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II (2003) · Bonfire, before the Prologue

Still to come

• “Tanha Dil” Listen ↗Shaan (2000)
• “Bhaag D.K. Bose” Listen ↗Ram Sampath, from Delhi Belly (2011)
• “Hotel California” Listen ↗Eagles
• “Dil Pe Zakhm Khate Hain” Listen ↗Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
• “Tera Mera Rishta” Listen ↗Mustafa Zahid, from Awarapan (2007)
• “Nadaan Parinde” Listen ↗A.R. Rahman and Mohit Chauhan, from Rockstar (2011)
• “Laadki” Listen ↗Sachin-Jigar, Kirtidan Gadhvi, Tanishka Sanghvi and Rekha Bhardwaj, Coke Studio India
• “Mockingbird” Listen ↗Eminem
• “Lose Yourself” Listen ↗Eminem
• “Alvida” Listen ↗KK, from Life in a Metro (2007)

Post-Credits

Loot Table

Every game that drops in this draft, and where you pick it up. The list gets longer as the book does.

• Super Mario Bros.A knock-off NES that was only passing through, and a mushroom. Prologue.
• DOTA 2The four in the morning, and the friend who got me an interview. Chapters 2 and 2.5.
• Counter-Strike 1.6The meteor that hit my board exams. Chapter 1.
• Mass EffectThe warp drive, delivered by mass relay. Chapter 1.
• Dark Souls 2The Pursuer, one whole night, killed on the first try in the morning. Chapter 1.
• The Legend of ZeldaIt is dangerous to go alone. The first bonfire.
• Super Mario Bros., againSeven castles, seven polite no's. The bonfire after the Prologue.
• Resident Evil and Final FantasyTypewriters and crystals, the save points. The bonfire after Chapter 1.
• Ridge Racer, with GalaxianThe loading screen you could play. The bonfire after Chapter 2.5.
• Donkey KongWhere Mario was still called Jumpman, and still a carpenter. A Fun Fact in the Prologue.
• Half-LifeThe game Counter-Strike started life as a free mod for. Chapter 1.
• Warcraft IIIThe game DOTA started life as a free map for. Chapter 2.
• P.T.A free horror teaser, then a two-thousand-dollar PS4. Chapter 2.5.
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33Thirty people, a first game, a crack in the glass. Chapter 3.
• DOOMThe game I want to work on, and the WAD files that got one modder hired. Chapter 3 and its bonfire.

Post-Credits

Glossary

For the Outsider. Hindi, Gujarati, Mumbai and a little gamer, in the order the alphabet prefers, not the order they hurt.

AAA

The blockbuster end of games. Huge budgets, huge teams, huge marketing, and a job ad that asks for AAA experience.

aloo

Potato.

beta

Son, or child. Affectionate, and usually followed by advice.

bhindi

Okra. The good vegetable in this story.

bunk

To skip school. As in, I bunked every day.

chaniya

The long petticoat that goes under a saree. My mother stitched a lot of them.

chhaas

Buttermilk, thin and salted. One bowl each, in our house.

Diwali

The festival of lights, and the one time of year an Indian kid is owed new clothes.

donation seat

A place at a college bought with a large, entirely voluntary, completely mandatory donation.

faltu gyaan

Useless wisdom nobody asked for. My speciality.

gacha

A game where you pay for random draws, like a capsule-toy machine. Belgium calls the paid kind gambling.

junior college

Eleventh and twelfth grade, in Maharashtra. School ends at tenth.

Kandivali

A suburb in the north of Mumbai. Where the one television was.

kurta

A long, loose shirt. Last year's is the one everyone notices.

lakh

One hundred thousand. Seventeen lakh rupees is 1.7 million.

leecher

Someone who downloads the whole torrent and shares nothing back. Not the blood-sucking kind. Usually.

Naukri

An Indian job site. Also just the word for a job.

one-BHK

A flat with one bedroom, a hall and a kitchen. Ours had eight people in it.

prelims

The practice exams a school sets before the board exams. The rehearsal.

Royal Stag, Old Monk

A cheap whisky and a cheap rum. What a fired twenty-two-year-old could afford.

saala

Literally, brother-in-law. Actually, a mild swear. Damn it, you bastard, depending on the tone.

Saala, ye dukh kahe khatam nahi hota be?

Hindi. Damn it, why does this misery never end? From the film Masaan (2015). Now a meme for every Monday.

sabzi

A cooked vegetable dish. Also, in our house, a lesson in arithmetic.

saree

The long draped garment worn by women across India. The good ones get a cover, and my mother stitched the covers.

seeding

Sharing the file you downloaded, so other people can download it too. Nothing to do with farming.

Shabd mere hain, edit thoda AI ne kiya hai

Hindi. The words are mine; AI did a bit of editing.

SSC

Secondary School Certificate. The tenth-grade board exam in Maharashtra, and the most important day of your life until it is not.

standard

School grade. Tenth standard is tenth grade.

thak gaya

Tired, but more than tired. Finished. The battery is out.

Thai jaase, beta. Tu tension nai le.

Gujarati. It will happen, son. Don't you take the tension.

visiting card

A business card, in Indian English. My father's whole business, for years.

Post-Credits

About the Author

Niraj Sangani has been making games for about fourteen years, most of them other people’s, patched until they felt whole. Before that he was a kid in a one-BHK in Kandivali who lost a television war and somehow concluded this made him qualified to design systems for a living.

He lives in Bangalore with Player Two, the Princess, and a shoe collection that stopped being a hobby a while ago. He is still walking to the next castle.