Lesson 1: Thought Out > Freestyled

When I tell people that I’m a game designer, the first question I usually get is a half-joking, “So you just play games all day, right?” When I tell them that I’m also a battle rapper, their first question (or possibly second, after “You mean like in 8 Mile?”) is a more serious, “So you just make it all up as you go, right?”

The short answer to both questions is: Uh, no. The longer answers are less dismissive, but the full story doesn’t offer much clarity, just a richer confusion.

“Game designer” is, first of all, a somewhat nebulous term even inside the games industry. It can involve everything from tweaking the numbers that control a level’s physics to fleshing out the backstory of a world. Any decision that will affect the player’s end experience is a design decision.

In its simplest and most maddening terms, a game designer’s job is to make the game fun. This is a serious task when your toes are on the starting line of a multi-year development cycle costing tens of millions of dollars. It requires laying out a clear vision of what the final product will be and then constantly adjusting that vision to hit the numerous moving targets of timeline, budget, and business objectives (the latter is generally code for “demands from a manager who doesn’t know shit about games”).

The myth of all rap battles being “freestyled” is a bit harder to tackle. Even many hip-hop fans are unaware that the word “freestyle” itself has a fuzzy and contentious meaning, especially on the East Coast. Novitiates tend to think that it necessarily signals an improvisation, but it can also refer to rapping a written verse either a capella or over a beat it wasn’t intended for, a definition that goes back to the beginning of the genre. And even in pure “freestyle battles,” the top performers always use what we call premeds, short for “premeditated rhymes,” a softer term than outright accusing someone of spitting writtens.

What really changed the game was YouTube.

As soon as the site launched, battle fans began uploading the grainy camcorder videos they had been hoarding and trading on rap forums for years. Suddenly, everyone knew what everyone else looked like. Given how small the local scenes were, it was easy to get an idea of who would be at a given event and then show up with lines written specifically for them. And not only did YouTube kill freestyling, it also killed beats and stages and mics. It was easier to put out a good product on video in the rawer street battle format; you didn’t need a venue or large crew or even permits if you knew the right spots to shoot. The combination of technological possibility and mass popularity have made a capella written battles the dominant format, with battle rap leagues all over the world getting YouTube views that reach into the millions.

Game designer. Battle rapper. The other common response I get when someone learns about my parallel careers is some mention of just how strange the game design/battle rap amalgam seems. But, in my experience, this kind of unrestrained boundary crossing is the rule, not the exception; I have yet to meet a creative person my age or younger who isn’t also a polymath of some sort. And while the Internet enables and encourages such hybridization, it also turns creative communities into airtight echo chambers, with more acronyms, jargon, and in-jokes than any one person can reasonably learn.

Which means, I’m sure, that the game designers I know who are also coders, tech journalists, screenwriters, cartoonists, and illustrators, and the rappers who are also actors, sketch comedians, painters, and poets, are all constantly clearing up misconceptions about their own varied pursuits, with answers that are equally complex and unsatisfying.

Lesson 2: Teams > Visionaries

The phrase “Hustle Economy” tends to imply a lone creator starting up a million-dollar media empire from a laptop in her bedroom. Just as often, though, it manifests as a large company hustling to understand and exploit an online space before its competitors do the same. And more capital can mean more potential for success—or sweepingly theatrical failure.

I’ve personally witnessed the latter case twice: Once at Ganz, the company behind the massively successful children’s game Webkinz, and once at JumpOff, the first outlet to host a truly worldwide rap battle tournament. “Ganz” and “JumpOff” might not mean much to the average person, but for anyone in their respective industries, these single words hold an instant significance that is comparable to, say, “Chernobyl.”

Ganz started out as a family-run manufacturer of homey gifts and dollar-store tchotchkes—decidedly not a video game company. By the time I was hired, the founder’s grandson Howard Ganz had taken over the reins. Webkinz was Howard’s big gamble. What if, he posited, each plush toy gave kids access to an online world, where they could play with and care for a virtual version of their new pet?

Today, this seems obvious, but Webkinz was the first to get there. The most unexpected outcome of Webkinz’s stratospheric growth was the huge number of adults who were playing. Howard realized that if he could market a product directly to this market—mostly 40+ women, a demographic the games industry had outright ignored to that point—there was big money to be made. He envisioned our next project as a full-scale MMO, the World of Warcraft for middle-aged, middle-American women. And he wanted us to build it in nine months.

If anyone in upper management had actually been involved in developing an MMO before, they would have laughed Howard out of his own office at that timeline. But they hadn’t. One PM who arrived close to the end told me, “I’ve read about projects like this in books.” He didn’t mean as an example to be followed.

Even before that particular project was shut down without producing so much as a playable build, four new games of similar scope were already underway. They, at least, made it out the door, but not much further. I followed them shortly afterward. Today, after years of losses and steady layoffs, the staff that used to fill six rooms’ worth of converted warehouse space now fits in half of one room. All of the managers responsible are still there, of course.

JumpOff’s rise and fall in the battle world was characterized by the opposite mistake: bringing in the right people and then not listening to them, to the point of outright disrespect. Which is a certain death sentence in a context where street rules are only one step removed.

The owner of JumpOff was a smooth-headed Brit known by the always-ironic, now-infamous mononym Harry. To his credit, the concept of a global battle league was nothing short of visionary at the time, and he believed so boldly in its potential that he sold his London flat to finance it.

The World Rap Championships was organized as a two-versus-two competition, with divisions in Toronto, the UK, Australia, and all over the States. I partnered with another rapper I knew through a mutual friend, named PORICH (derived from “Poor Rich”—stylization his). After winning the Toronto division, Rich and I moved on to the playoffs in New York.

This is where shit really popped off. The WRCs had been plagued all along by dubious judging calls. Finally, a member of the Detroit team thought to confer directly with the judges after a questionable loss in the semifinals. It turned out they had each written down a different result than the one Harry announced. I remember walking into the hallway to see the judging panel of Craig G., Pumpkinhead, and Poison Pen—all rappers with hot-forged respect and all New Yorkers of significant size—speaking to Harry in fuck-you tones, and explicitly thinking that I was witnessing the end of JumpOff.

I was more right than I knew. A few rounds later, after some frantic scuffling around the table in the corner, Harry called our attention to admit, “We’ve, uh, misplaced the tapes. All of them.” Hours of searching, including bag-checks and pat-downs, turned up nothing. The rest of the battles went ahead, but with only B-roll footage to show for most of the tournament. JumpOff no longer had a viable online product. From that anticlimactic moment on, the company was essentially a nonfactor.

The mystery of what happened to the JumpOff tapes has passed into battle rap urban legend. The leading theory is that the Detroit team or one of their entourage stole them in retribution, which the two rappers themselves have at various times both confirmed and denied. It’s also possible one or more of the judges were involved, or that JumpOff themselves messed up the footage and were trying to cover their asses.

Despite being antipodal as organizations, JumpOff and Ganz degenerated into similar cautionary tales about what happens when a sole benefactor pushes too hard into a space he doesn’t truly understand. But they also each gave a vast cross-section of like-minded creative people a unique chance to connect. The crop of battle leagues that now run the scene were almost all founded by former WRC entrants, including the Toronto-based King of the Dot—one of the largest battle organizations in the world—whose first event was headlined by PORICH and myself. And I was brought in to my current game design job by a friend I met at Ganz; there are similar pockets of ex-Ganzers at gaming and animation companies all over the city.

This is by far the most exciting aspect of working in the modern economy. Creative pursuits—even those as ego-driven as battle rap—are, in the end, necessarily collaborative. And you can never predict just where those collaborations might come from, or how far they might take you.

Lesson 3: Sanity > Success

I was twenty-five years old when I started experiencing anxiety attacks for the first time. Exclusively at the office. I would retreat to whichever lounge area or washroom stall I found empty and try to calm my breathing. Sometimes it worked.

The pressure reached its worst point when I booked a battle at what would be King of the Dot’s biggest event yet. What I didn’t realize is that, the week before the battle, my current project at Ganz would be going into Crunch. This is an infamous games industry term for the standard period before launch when the team works unpaid overtime—evenings, weekends, all-nighters, whatever it takes—in order to make the deadline. We had already passed by several arbitrary “launch dates” for the game with no consequence, but for whatever reason, the powers-that-be decided we were going to make this one. (We didn’t.)

That event set a record for KOTD attendance. I could barely move through the crowd in the one-room club; I could not move the cement block that was sitting on top of my chest. I’d had no time for sleep in the past seven days, let alone editing and practicing my verses to the expected level. Not only did my opponent rip me apart in what I consider the worst loss I’ve ever taken, but I got my first taste of the morning-after Twitter backlash. Now that everyone had an image to maintain and a visible public platform on which to do so, the battle wasn’t over when you left the ring.

There was even more social media anxiety to contend with at Ganz. After we finally managed to launch a game, I was responsible for interacting with our new fans over Facebook—an overwhelming task, even with our modest install base. I created an admin account and accepted friend requests so they could message me, which meant that I saw semi-frequent posts in my newsfeed about another player losing their house, or going bankrupt from medical bills. Our game was free to play; we made money only through selling access to special “premium” items. Essentially, people were spending money for pixels on a screen, and some of them were spending in the hundreds.

We had tools that would have let me check for any crossover between the bankruptcies and the big spenders. But I never had the stomach to do it.

Then, there were the other stories. Two of our most-involved fans lived in Romania, a mother and her school-aged daughter. They became so close with the game community that the daughter started referring to one of the older women—a Canadian who had emigrated from Ecuador—as “grandma.” The daughter posted her report card and got an instant stream of congratulatory comments. And when we did a live fan chat event, we received a long private message from one player telling us that no matter how many bugs or issues there were with the game, she would always keep playing, because the community had given her a sense of belonging that she hadn’t felt since her husband passed. A few of us might have had to wipe tears off our keyboards that night.

Contradictory as it may seem, this surreal unifying pull is very much part of the battle scene as well, although for a different generation and gender. I will never forget standing in the entrance of the club at one of KOTD’s marquee World Domination events, for which battlers fly in from across the globe, and being told by a Filipino rapper that I was a big influence on him—right before a passing Norwegian joined the conversation to tell me the same.

What I came to realize is: In the Hustle Economy, whatever your job title may be, your most critical task is the management of your own anxiety. Stress is a constant presence in any hustle-based industry, and it only increases with time and success. Finding strategies to cope is a matter of sheer survival.

In the case of battle rap, I eventually had to stop logging into my pseudonymous accounts altogether. Sustained existence in that world was just too much. And contrary to conventional wisdom, my name was not forgotten when I stopped tweeting every minute. I haven’t battled in more than two years, and I still get recognized in public; I’ve had some long, rewarding conversations this way, even in Real Life.

Perhaps what has helped the most, though, is the thought that the crushing anxiety inherent to the Hustle Economy is a necessary counterpart to its addictive vital energy. My favorite battle line ever directed at me was from a rapper named 100 Bulletz: “How’re you an atheist, but don’t believe in evolution?” His use of my personal views to skewer my battle career’s stagnation was gleefully devastating. But taking the line seriously, Bulletz was exactly wrong. Evolution is one of the few things I do believe in.

And it’s the energy of evolution, sped up, that drives the creative hustle—reckless, full of impropriety, coursing ceaselessly, and striving in every direction to find a way forward.

Zoom in on the source of your stress.

***

Are you anxious because you have too many
things to tackle, or not enough?

***

Are you focused on accomplishing things,
or merely on dealing with people?

***

What makes you crazy can also motivate you:
Go in the direction your stress is guiding you.

***

Go toward what’s challenging but potentially amazing.

***

Get away from what’s challenging but doesn’t
offer you any pay-offs.