Rob Fearon / @retroremakes
I’m a full time carer who makes videogames. In that order. Sometimes I’m helping someone else live their life to the fullest, other times I’m flashing lights in people’s faces whilst sitting around in my underwear. Both of these things are good things, both of these things make me happy.
North West England
England
Space Giraffe
Dishonored, a game which happily hands you the toys and let’s you muddle your own way through to the finale, but really, it’s a game about owning your mistakes and rolling with them. That’s when it’s at its best.
I lived at the rough end of town at the wrong time for the town and the bullying there was constant. There were a couple of families where this stuff, it wasn’t just one lad gone awry, this was generational stuff. The same folks that bullied me, their parents bullied my parents and so it went before. Dad hit son hit whoever was passing and so it went on. One of the worst families for it lived at a house between mine and my best friends, they’d run out of the house when you passed it just to hurl abuse or to try and hit you. It was so screwed up, the parents would join in. I still don’t know what to make of that.
Years later, when I was much older, they’d lurk outside pubs waiting for fights with strangers, sometimes carrying weapons, whatever it would take. Their younger brothers would be at home, earlier in the day or evening repeating the same behaviour they pulled. Weird and saddening way to live your life, really.
At school, I went to the “best” school in the area. Miles away from home, up the more luxurious end of town. And y’know, “we” weren’t supposed to go there, not those of us from our end of town so myself and the two people who didn’t live in the normal catchment zone copped it there too. We copped it for not coming from families with money, we copped it for often being better spoken than the bullies, we copped it just for looking like we had two brain cells to rub together, we just copped it – I could rationalise a million reasons why but really, we just existed and for some reason, that was bad enough. Every break time someone would try it on, either cornering one of us in the grounds or just walking past hurling abuse or randomly slapping someone, anything to make us feel more uncomfortable.
At home that meant getting between my friends and my own house became a nightly chore of plotting routes, trying to plot safer routes. Do I go up past the flats, round the back of the shops and hope I can get through that way, all the time hoping they wouldn’t be at the shops? Do I go straight up the street and hope for the fastest route breaking into a run when I pass their house? Can I run fast enough tonight? Do I go down the avenue, up an alley, out the alley, across the road, into another alley, round the back and up again? How do I avoid making it look like this is the way I’m going to be going all the time because they would wait. They would be there. That’s just what they did.
At school, we grouped up. Safety in numbers. A disparate group of people who liked computer games, didn’t fit in with the rugby playing, football to your face not-like-us. Sometimes I’d sit and draw in the grounds, sitting somewhere fairly visible so if anything kicked off, I could just grab stuff and move on. I was a cheeky git, I’d answer back. Not smartly, bluntly. Sometimes if they cornered another lad, I’d walk up and tell them to shift it and move on. Sometimes I’d get a whack but at least the other lad could duck off. I was just something they couldn’t wrap their head round so I got it easier, not easy, it didn’t stop, just easier. Where easier is the difference between all the time, every break time and not all the time, every break time.
The school had no systems in place to deal with bullying and when the bullies were often “star pupils” who upped the prestige of the school, no interest in dealing with it either.
I managed the bullying, eventually, the day I left that school. When I walked out the door and I never had to speak to these people again, when I never had to face them again. I managed it. I managed it because it wasn’t happening anymore.
I managed the bullying at home by not being at home. I managed it by living elsewhere, by being elsewhere.
I still can’t see any other ways out. I didn’t really manage it, I endured it the whole time. And then one day, I wasn’t there for it to happen to and everything was better, I chose who I surrounded myself with and I surrounded myself with better people. Sometimes you can’t just make it stop but you can get through. And it’s knowing that there’s another side, knowing that it won’t happen forever, y’know?
It made me terribly unhappy for very long periods of time. Dealing with all this, it didn’t make me a better, stronger person. It didn’t break me, it didn’t make me. It was just this constant undercurrent of nastiness that I’d have to deal with, day in, day out. This constant hum of people trying to make me more miserable for no other reason than they decided to make me more miserable. It wasted my time, the time I spent plotting routes down the street, that was time I could have been doing something better. The time I spent dealing with abuse at school was time I could have spent doing something that made me happy instead. It’s time I should have been happier instead but someone wanted to take that from me. For a while, about 2 or 3 years, they did.
I don’t even hate them for it, I just feel terribly sad for them.
So I make videogames and people seem to like them. That’s great. It wasn’t quite what I’d planned, for some reason I once figured that being a rock star would be my best shot (OK, I was a teenager, I had plenty of reasons…) but turns out, it wasn’t really. And that’s OK. I think the videogames thing was probably for the best. I’ve met enough rock stars, I’ll stick with the flashing lights and underpants thing I have, not theirs.
I’m a carer, I don’t have the quietest of lives, it’s long hours, sometimes sleep is thin on the ground and it can be draining physically and financially but that’s OK too. Because I’m not the only person on the planet who deserves to be happy.
I have good friends out there in the real world, I’ve met a myriad of good and wonderful people through writing videogames too. I run one of the oldest indie related news sites on the net so I can cheer myself up whenever I choose by helping someone else get the word out about their work. That never fails. We have a small forum of people who’d pull their fingernails out if it meant it’d help someone else. I’m surrounded by good people on the internet, even my Twitter feed is full of the most wonderful people. I see what they do, every day, what they fight for, who they fight for and I’m happy to see that.
And I have a wonderful, wonderful family where every day, even when things have been hard (and they have been hard), every day there’s something to smile about.
I wake up, no matter what else is going on around me, I wake up safe. Always. There hasn’t been a day in the past 13 years where I haven’t woken up and had a laugh, where something hasn’t happened to cheer me up, to keep me pushing on. A few years back, I nearly shuffled off this planet due to illness and even then, with oxygen mask on, fighting to breathe, I smiled every day. We keep each other safe, we encourage each other to be what we can be, to be what we want to be. To be happy.
Anything else I’ve done, anything else I’ve achieved, it’s nothing compared to knowing you’re surrounded by people who want you to be happy. My life is immeasurably better for that and for five or so years in my teens, it seemed like the thing I could never have. Now I only have to think about the bullying when someone asks “Rob, were you ever bullied?” because everything else is OK.
I’m free.
Did you think your life was ever going to be this good?
No. There were times during the bullying where I couldn’t see an end in sight. Where I didn’t think it’d ever end. Where I didn’t think I’d ever get through it, where I didn’t see how I could get through it. When it’s every day, everywhere, and it’s all I knew, I couldn’t see outside of it.
Turns out though, yeah, you can get through it and the other side is much nicer too.
Make videogames. Go to your local library and ask them to stock a copy of this book. Or if you have ten pounds spare, buy a copy of the book. It’s the videogame equivalent of The Manual and that’s important to remember because The Manual is the best book on making videogames that isn’t about making videogames.
Or don’t. And make videogames anyway.
Just make videogames if that’s what you want to do because I want to play the videogames you make and I won’t be alone in that. Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t or shouldn’t make games. Of course you can and of course you should.
Find your voice. Make games. Be you.
What do you do now?
I’m a full time carer who makes videogames. In that order. Sometimes I’m helping someone else live their life to the fullest, other times I’m flashing lights in people’s faces whilst sitting around in my underwear. Both of these things are good things, both of these things make me happy.