The perfect job

There is a secret to happiness in life. Several of them, in fact. But the one that has always rang the truest for me is the one about how to find the perfect job.

The goal, essentially, is to find something that you love to do, and then find someone to pay you to do it. Or, more simply, to con someone into paying you to play.

We all have our own definitions of play. And that's fine. The idea is just to get paid to do it. Not everyone can manage that. How many people think of janitorial work as play? Or accounting? Or retail? Maybe some people do; I don't know. But there are probably some jobs that are just jobs, that people do because they need the money, and not because they love it (like telemarketing).


For me, in this fictitious world I've created with this blog, I imagine I would be paid to blog. Since I have a million readers (in theory), I could probably make a fair amount of money selling ad space, cross linking, or something like that. That would be a job of play.

But in the real world, at the time of this writing, there are only 111 views to the blog. Nowhere near enough to be worth advertising dollars. And that's okay. There are other jobs I could get to play with.

One I've been considering in particular is getting paid to play video games. Not as a game tester; that's not really a great job. You play the same sections over and over, looking for glitches, testing the frustration level, seeing how well the music works, that kind of thing. Useful, but not fun. What I have in mind is being paid to actually play.

Imagine you're a video game company executive. Part of your job is trying to make sure your games sell better than the competition. Some of this you do by focusing on your demographic. Some of it you do by (hopefully) just making a better game. But a lot of it comes down to blind luck. Well, it doesn't have to.

What if you had someone who played the games of your competition and looked for trends? Someone who identified problems in game play, and how other companies dealt with those problems. Someone who even suggested new ways to deal with those problems, or identified which ways work best and which were annoying, or dull. Someone who could look a the current market of games and find that hole, the niche that isn't being filled, but that there IS a desire for.

I mean, finding something that isn't in video game form isn't hard. There are no video games that focus on tax law. That's because tax law is boring. But there are places where a successful game could go that no one has been going to so far.

And then there's the research that could go into an MMO. What makes them popular? How do we get people to feel like it's worth the money? How do you make the jerks who want PVP happy while making the people who want PVE happy and the non-jerks who want PVP happy all at the same time?

What leveling system works best? What do you need to have for that leveling? What powers unbalance the game to the point of not being fun anymore, and which ones unbalance the game to make it awesome?

These things aren't hard to find. But someone who was well qualified to find these overlaps, who was used to looking for what is missing or following the trends over a large sample, that might be difficult. Who would be best to do that?

Well, I would. And if I could convince someone at a video game company of that fact, I could have the perfect job. I'd play video games, I'd write reports, and I'd give presentations. Plus, I'd get paid.

The perfect job.