The Allure of New Horizons

I have always been plagued by the demon known as Ambition. As a youth, I never felt at home in the place I grew up in. I always wanted more. I knew my life was elsewhere. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do but I knew I couldn’t do it in the rural NEOhioan town in which I was raised.

In my late teens, I met a girl. A girl I would end up marrying. Her career would take us to the Cleveland suburbs–which offered more but still wasn’t enough for me. I took jobs that weren’t good fits but would do for now while I figured out what it was I was going to do for a career.

I worked hard, I put together a tabletop game called Little Fears, which became a critical darling and an indie hit. It opened up doors for me in the field of game design. In 2004, I accepted a position with Human Head Studios as the director of their adventure games division. It was a big opportunity in a new city, a new state. I uprooted my wife and our young daughter to Madison, Wisconsin. I moved them away from family–both mine and my wife’s–in pursuit of a dream. I worked at that studio for a few years before moving on to a local video game startup as an associate game designer. When that place shuttered, I turned to freelance to keep afloat.

The entire time, I looked for a new opportunity. A new position. A new studio. A new place. I eventually found that in 2012 when I accepted a position at Volition in Champaign, Illinois.

Once again, I pulled up the family stakes and relocated us–my wife and now two kids–to start over. New city, new friends, new jobs for both of us adults. A clean slate.

The move was hard. I went ahead and lived in an economy hotel for a week before settling into a rental home for a month while my wife got everything in Madison ready for transition. A huge endeavor that she handled alone. Eventually, they moved down and we started our life there. We made friends, we bought a house, our roots began to tendril into the soil and take hold. But I would soon yank them out.

I stayed with Volition until Spring 2018, when I accepted an offer at Funcom in Durham, North Carolina. A lot of reasons, a lot of emotions, went into that move. I didn’t have to go. It wasn’t like it was in Madison where I was at the whim of contracts and my own meager publications to stay afloat. But, still, it was a new opportunity, a new title, a new studio, and I felt the pull of Ambition telling me to “Go. Go now.”

It wasn’t the first opportunity to leave Volition that I had. I had interviewed at multiple other places, gotten offers, accepted one, and even planned to follow through with it before life went south. My dad got sick. My friends asked me to stay. It was a lot on my shoulders, and I eventually had to pull out of that opportunity. I stayed at Volition for another year or so.

But the demon Ambition was ever-present on my shoulders. My dad passed. My mom was looking to relocate, to be nearer to us. I thought the opportunity at Funcom would be the right one. A good place for us all to be. A big job title at a company whose games I dug.

Again, I packed up the family and moved us far away. Goodbye, friends. Goodbye, jobs. Goodbye, Champaign.

The demon Ambition smiled.

But life in North Carolina was rocky. We went through the motions but they were so hollow. My family was unhappy. My wife and kids were far away from long-time friends. My wife’s community was states away. Intellectually, I knew that. I thought I understand. But I was blind to what that really meant.

In Summer 2019, my life imploded. My wife asked for a divorce. She and the kids went back to Champaign. Funcom and I parted ways. I floundered. I desperately submitted resumes to everywhere. I had some really promising calls. But it was an opportunity at a place I had once contracted that was the no-brainer. I was offered a job in Chicago, just a few hours away from where my kids would be. At a studio I liked, working with some people I had known for nearly two decades.

But my mom had bought a house in North Carolina just a couple months prior and was relocating. She had an offer on her house in that small town in Ohio I grew up in. That house I grew up in. She was uprooting her life, everything she had known for 40 years, to be closer to her family. Just in time for all of us to go away.

The demon Ambition laughed. It had claimed yet another victim. Another casualty of my selfishness and narrow-minded tunnel vision. How had I become so greedy? So self-centered? So blind to the fact I had sworn to share a life with others, not just drag them along in my wake as I went where the whim and the whimsy took me?

I couldn’t stand what had happened. It was like looking at a seven-car pileup that you had caused. It was too big to comprehend. Too painful to absorb at all once. All I could do was reel from the impact, segment, and dissociate as I worked through what my life–what so many lives–had become. Because of me.

I started my new job in September of last year. I love it. I’m getting to use design muscles I haven’t flexed in years. I work with an amazing team. The project is dope. I like being in the Chicago suburbs. My kids visit me and I visit them. I got to take them to Medieval Times to see the new show. I get to pop into IKEA to grab cheap Scandinavian furniture whenever I want. Well, I used to before the pandemic happened.

I live in a small apartment just minutes from the office, though that’s less of a benefit given the entire state is under a Shelter in Place order. But still.

I’ve been here now for seven months and I’ve tried to get settled. I’ve tried to find “home” in this place even though I’m going through a divorce, live away from my kids, and my mom is now 18 hours away, living near no support system whatsoever.

My job has been the one port in this storm that has kept me sane and kept me grounded while every other aspect of my life raged around me. Over time, I’ve calmed and settled and taken stock. I’m slowly establishing something here. But there’s still been a sense of detachment. I look around and I’m trying to find my life in all this. The one drop of paint in the ocean.

And that’s where I’ve been for a long time now, awash amidst so much newness and uncertainty. Smashing against the rocks like my family did every time I grabbed them by the shoulders and shoved them in a new direction.

Ambition is still on my shoulder, jumping up and down, demanding attention. But I don’t listen anymore.

I stopped listening after everything blew up. I realized what a demon Ambition was. I realized what it had cost my family and, in turn, what it had cost me.

The pieces of the puzzle had been assembling for months. I was starting to see the picture of destruction and devastation but I was missing a vital piece. Again, I understood it intellectually but it wasn’t internalized, it wasn’t realized within me.

Funnily enough, it was a video game that helped me truly sort it out.

I picked up Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Switch earlier this week. I originally got it so that my son and I could play and share our experiences. But, as I got more and more into the game, my eyes opened to feelings, realizations, that had been dormant inside of me, awaiting a light to be shined on them.

It started with placing the tent, establishing where my character would live on this new island. It’s one of the first things you do in the game but it places a stake in the ground around which everything else revolves. You don’t truly understand the ramifications of this choice until later, until more people are involved, more of the island comes to life.

The first few days of playing, I went through the routine: gather resources, complete objectives, build what’s needed, talk to people. My duty was a shopping list: do this, get that, do this, get that.

I was having fun but it was surface. Then I got some fun furniture and decorations. I put them on the wall. I built tables and chairs and a bed and I meticulously sorted everything out. I planted flowers around my house, around my neighbors’ houses. I put up a fence around the museum and planted a tree. I fussed over where to put the outdoor furniture in the homes I was building for new villagers to enjoy.

I visited other islands, saw what people had established on their own. I saw the pride in which they were creating their new world. I took ideas, inspiration, and brought it over to my island. I did more. I planted more. I built more. I had a new drive, a new purpose. I had…pride.

I wanted to make my little home on my little island the best it could be. I wanted to set down roots for my character and build a community for them. I talk to the other villagers to build relationships. I give them presents. I want them to be happy. I want them to be my community. I want to stay on this little island and make it somewhere I can call “home.”

It hit me like a slap in the face. This was what I had been missing in the real world. This sense. I had had houses, and friends, and routines but never a sense of pride, of community, of home. The demon Ambition had my head spinning, always looking toward the horizon for the next new thing. I never got to enjoy where I was, what I was doing. I left that to others. Sure, I fixed the toilet and hung up some pictures but it was rote. I was lacking that connection. I had routines but they were obligation at best.

43 years and it took a video game about animals building a town to teach me what comes naturally to so many others.

I’ve been a fool. I listened to the wrong things. I wanted the wrong things. And it cost me everything that mattered to me.

While it’s too late to undo the damage I’ve done in real life, I can start anew with this knowledge in hand. I can build a new life, can find joy inside a smaller radius, can look to the horizon and see the sunrise instead of a destination. I can decapitalize ambition and turn it from a demon to something manageable. I can still want without needing to salt the earth behind me.

I can and have apologized for what I’ve done in the pursuit of whatever it was I was chasing for so many years. It won’t untie the knot, it won’t put the apple back on the tree, but my sense of sorrow and regret is sincere. I am so sorry to those my lust for Ambition has affected. My family, most of all, but my friends, their friends, my community, their community.

I am still learning, still trying to figure this out. But I will continue to build, to live, to be, to grow. And if you stop my island–in the game or here in the Chicago suburbs–forgive the mess. It’s still under construction.