Career counseling from Fantasy Life ⊟

I started Fantasy Life as a Cook, and immediately fell in love with it. I leveled up by cooking new and complicated recipes. I upgraded my equipment by buying a new pan. And when I went out into the monster-filled wilderness, any combat I engaged in was either incidental or in search of meat or other ingredients.

Then, about ten hours in, I changed my Life and became an Angler (the super cute Angler artwork above comes from Grace). And it wasn’t like starting over. In fact, my career as a Cook benefited me in my new Life. As silly as it sounds, seeing that reflected in a game made me feel better about my own life.

I got three different degrees for two different fields. I abandoned academia for a career as a librarian, then got a job writing video game news while I was still in library school. When I finished that degree, I went full-time with Joystiq. Then, six years later, I left my job there for a completely different career as a stay-at-home parent… during which time I also started a side business, which you’re reading now.

I’ve never regretted any of the career paths I took, or any of the changes I made, but I have experienced a general low-level anxiety about not having a single long-term plan I’ve committed to, like I lack the experience my peers have because I haven’t done the same thing for a dozen years or more. Or like I’m a weirdo for starting a job at 27 that others started at like 22.

In Fantasy Life, players are not just allowed to change professions on a dime, but encouraged to do so. It costs nothing to visit a town’s guild office and re-register as a Blacksmith or a Paladin or an Alchemist or whatever. Your progress in previous jobs is preserved – and you can complete the challenges you’ve been given in previous jobs while doing the new one. Even better, you retain access to all the skills you learned in previous jobs. When I switched from Cook to Angler, it was because I had a lot of seafood recipes I wanted to cook and I thought it would be nice to catch my own fish.

It turned out, however, that fishing didn’t just help me achieve my cooking goals. My previous experience as a Cook increased my “Focus” stat, which made fishing easier. The time I had spent in the game meant I had unlocked new areas with new fish in them, that a novice Angler wouldn’t normally have access to. And I had leveled up in general, mostly by cooking, allowing me to survive in those areas long enough to fish. I reached “Adept” status as an Angler in just a couple of hours, something that had taken me much longer to do as a Cook.

And reflecting on my history, the same is true in my real life. I was able to complete library school in a year because I had a lot of really intense experience doing research for my linguistics MA. And both that MA and library school taught me research skills that I put to use as a journalist… along with the skill of writing news really quickly between other things, which I might have picked up during lunch breaks at my library internship. And as for being a parent… uh, nothing prepared me for that. I always kind of knew that I was benefiting from past endeavors, but never with quite the clarity of an actual stat screen.

Even if it’s a “fantasy,” I take comfort from the way this game celebrates a breadth of experience. I can only imagine how soothing this message would feel to someone in Japan, where lifetime employment is still kind of expected but no longer the actual norm.

In Fantasy Life, having a lot of careers isn’t seen as detrimental, but helpful and even desirable. I met a revered character named the “Indubitable Crowned Champion” who mastered every available Life. He’s not a failure who hasn’t figured out what he wants to do. He’s a legend. I haven’t retired to my mountainside cabin yet, and I probably won’t take up hunting or wizardry in the near future, but I still feel like I learned something from his example.

[Fantasy Life angler artwork via Grace – check out her Tumblr here: http://kani-life.tumblr.com]