Why am I here?

I've been thinking about getting into this blogging stuff for a long time now. Now, I'm not going to bore the general masses with the mundane details of my daily life, I have something I think is a little more interesting in mind. I want to share the ongoing story of how I am working toward, and hopefully get, my dream job.

So, what is this dream job you may ask? Well, as you can clearly see by the title of this blog, I am a lifelong video game nerd. I found video games at a young age, between about 6 and 8 years old. At the time, in the mid 80's, I was playing some of the first popular systems, like the original Atari, NES, and Sega Master System. My dad even had a commodore 64 I can vaguely remember playing. I was hooked, and have spent much of my leisure time since then playing as many games as I can get my hands on.

I can remember times I would read in game magazines about the people who made the games I loved so much, and how lucky I thought those people were for having such cool jobs, but I never considered it a career I could work toward. My obsession with video games soon turned into full blown case of computer nerdery. As I worked my way through high school I decided that I wanted a career in the computer industry, but as I got older and computers took over the world I realized that I would need to narrow that down at some point. I was sure that there would be plenty of time for that.

This is the point where life happened. After high school, I spent two years in Mexico serving as a missionary for my church (yep, Mormon kid). When I got back, feeling ready to take over the world, I seemed to "fall into" jobs whenever I needed one. These weren't bad jobs, some of them were fun at times, but I did them knowing that they weren't the kinds of jobs I wanted to do for my whole life. Over about a 7 year period I was a bank teller, a truck driver, a paint mixer, a cell phone salesman, and a real estate agent. That last one was really the nail in the coffin of my tour of careers. I got my license just as the housing market got bad, and spent almost a year being really frustrated. While my career direction was foggy during all this time, luckily, my personal life was working out just fine. I got married and had two awesome kids. Having a young family put even more pressure on me to find a career I could stick with.

Now meet the hero of this story, my wife Jaime. Before you even ask, yes, it's spelled Jaime, but it's pronounced just like Jamie. You wouldn't believe how many Spanish telemarketing calls she gets. She had been working as an insurance agent since we got married, and when the real estate gig got bad she stepped up and started working full time so that I could go back to school for that great and mysterious career I was looking for. I started off at a local community college majoring in computer science, whatever that mean, but it just didn't feel like it was taking me where I wanted to go.

After a couple fruitless semesters, I finally heard the news that straightened me out. My sister had started at a new art school in the area in their Interior Design program. One day she told me that the school had just started a program called "Game Art and Design"... and I called the school less than a week later. I enrolled to The Art Institute - Sacramento in the fall of 2008, and started my first quarter there in January of 2009.

Well, let me get the point here. Why am I here? I'm hoping that maybe some of this can help future nerds like myself. It took me a long time to find out that this was even an option for me, and to be honest, I'm not even sure yet exactly where this will take me. I want to share what I know now and what I learn as I make my way through school and finding a career with anyone out there who thinks that making video games would be wicked awesome. Yup, that's about it in a nutshell.

For those of you who may be handy with a calendar, you may have noticed my little history ends about a year ago. You may be asking yourself what happened next, how the schooling is going. Well, I will get to that, I promise, but it's real late. So, I will get to that in the next post, after some sleep. If anyone actually reads this and has any specific questions, relevant or otherwise, please ask away. If my point is to help people I might as well talk about what you want to hear.