One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn over the past few months is how to start over. Again.

I did it at the beginning of 2007, and then again later that year, both times for game development career challenges.

And I knew the deal when I took it, this fall. When I said yes, I would come back here to NC and begin again, I was grateful, glad, smitten, warmed, encouraged, and enlivened by the deal. I could move back, take my time removing all my many books from those now-battered U-Haul boxes, start again slow with all the technical details that would not only get me back to where I was before, but further up, further in.

What’s been hard, sometimes, but not really, not terribly, is seeing that line where my status in this job ends, and the rest of my company begins. I am rationing out every dollar, I am coasting by on no health insurance, and I am working my way back into the parlance of video games, where I feel less able to trade on technical terms, and more capable of providing stupid metaphors until my vocabulary improves.

See, it’s just that … It’s just been bittersweet to hear some of the higher-ups remind each other about the company’s holiday party coming up. I’m not invited, of course. I am a contractor.

Disjointed, I think, is the emotion I feel over these little things. I didn’t even get a Christmas/holiday at all last year. As soon as Old Pasadena began hauling those gigantic freaky-ass red ornaments to the roofs of the shops, I was putting my Homestar Runner figurines into a cardboard box and surfing the unemployment benefits charts to see when I could apply for compensation. There was little sweet then, not with remaining employees having a gift exchange and Twittering about it for the rest of us to see. Heh. Those were weird, hard days.

But, inasmuch as I’ve now written about these things, I am really over them. Life is what it is, and I have plenty to be grateful for. I have inroads to make on so many pieces of my life, and I am occupied with them. It’s been a lesson of transition: I am no longer a project manager, a community architect, a design lead, a location scout, a proofreader. I am not on the outside, but I am also not on the inside loop, not like I was.

It’s different, starting over. It’s all a flipkick rodeo of responsibilities flying right out the window. It’s all simple again. It’s hurry up and wait. I am not creating content; I am experiencing that content.

When I was in California, doing high-profile player experience design, I was a huge advocate for the players. I spoke often and passionately about what it was like for someone to fall down the rabbithole of an Alternate Reality Game, and I worked to edit documents and content and the live event boundaries so that the client’s vision was also the playerbase’s best daydream.

You know how when architects or theatrical scene designers make their models, they put a little tiny stand-up silhouette of a human next to it, to provide scale? I always designed with the memory of myself as a player alongside the game: what it was like to play, to imagine, to feel as though the game had come alive and might be waiting around any corner with fresh ideas and open doorways and other people, a community of dreamers and thinkers. It’s one thing to secure funding. It’s quite another to keep the heart of the game beating, of creating a circulatory system made up of fine minds drawn together by the lure of a story they’re re-telling to each other, over and over. The oxygen-rich blood of universes, spinning together, a dance for the ages.

So what it feels like right now is that I have that opportunity to refresh the memory, to delve back deep into simple anonymity, to experience content as an end-user for a while. It won’t be long before I’m back in the saddle again, but this phase feels like it could be an offering, advocacy from the right place.

What makes a game fun, after all?

How can you know, if you never play?