My Job Is Disgaea
About a year ago, I shifted a lot of my focus toward taking my career very seriously. In turn, I made a conscious effort to adapt that attitude into as many other facets of my life as possible, in order to maintain my course.
One change I made was to play more strategy-based games and RPGs in order to improve my resource management and tactical skills. The most notable game that I’ve picked up in that regard is Disgaea, arguably the most definitive strategy RPG on the market (second only to Final Fantasy Tactics). While I have noticed an improvement in my personal abilities from those exercised within the game, I found that one staple of Japanese RPGs is ever-present: Level grinding. Little did I realize, however, just how valuable that experience would become.
You see, I’m currently one of the web developers for an online-based retail company. This is my first job of the sort, so I’m learning truckloads about the field daily. I have most recently come to the realization that my job (as I’m sure just about any in the software industry are already well-aware) is a whole lot of grinding, very much like I’ve done for years in RPGs.
For those who haven’t played Disgaea (and your life as a gamer should be considered incomplete until you have), it starts out like any other RPG in that whenever you complete a stage, you score items as loot. But one of the most infamous features that Disgaea is known for is that you have the ability to enter any item, in which itself contains a series of whole new stages to engage. From of which you can score even more items. Items that each contain more stages. And the cycle continues ad nauseum. Theoretically, you could play Disgaea forever.
That is how I see my job. Upon completion of each task, either a new problem will arise that we’ll have to go fix or a new opportunity will be discovered that we can then explore. Within each of those tasks, whole new tasks will then be discovered. And so on. It’s clear that it’s inherent of my position that it could potentially go on forever.
The good news is that also like any RPG that involves grinding, the further that I battle on, my skills sets level up and I obtain better equipment that make future challenges much easier as my career progresses through its “plot”. Eventually I’ll reach to the heights of the End Boss or drop this game in favor of taking my newly-developed skills into the arena of a different (though similar) title. Having mastered so much in the first Disgaea, picking up Disgaea 2 won’t be such a difficult transition since I won’t be learning the fundamentals from scratch.
