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I read a blog post by Jonathan Blow yesterday. Interesting read, one thing that stood out for me was the section about experiencing work burnout Talking about the first game he worked on: "That game was never very successful. It had design problems, but also, we didn’t really know how to talk about or promote a game; lastly, this was before many people played games over the internet, so the potential audience was pretty small. Back in those days I worked very hard. When we started the company I knew nothing about building 3D games; we learned very quickly. I would work long hours, late into the night, intensively. At some point we all burned ourselves out, I think. After we closed down that company, I went on to do a number of contractor things, game industry lecture things, magazine article things, and working on various independent projects that I never finished. Through that time, I was still very burned out. If you have never experienced burnout, it’s hard to explain. Burnout is not just “I don’t feel like working right now”; it is about your mind refusing to permit you to work, because it has seen what happens when it lets you work." Have you ever experienced this? It really struck a cord with me, i pretty much felt like this the entire time i was at university. I did a 3D computer animation degree back in 2001 at Portsmouth uni (UK). At the time there were only three universities in the whole country that did courses of this type, with Bournemouth being the flagship, and Portsmouth (as i soon found out) had just jumped on the bandwagon to milk money out of students. The course was run by three art or film lecturers that probably got forced into the job, you could tell none of them had any interest in the subject. They had no idea how to use any of the software we were using (3D max 3, photoshop) with one of them being completely computer illiterate. So my first project/animation i decided to create a homage to the evil dead. I built and furnished an exact replica of the cabin, the iconic Oldsmobile car, the destroyed bridge... i went to town. I had never put as much work and effort into anything as i did that project.... i barely scraped a pass. To be fair, it was an animation course and the animations were marked on their artistic merit, but nevertheless it was soul destroying. My second project was half arsed garbage and by my third project i had given up completely, making an animation in 4 hours the day before deadline (of a 2 month project) and getting a better mark then my first. Fuck you Portsmouth university i could've been a game designer If only i was mature enough to ignore the grades and just concentrated on building a portfolio of work i was proud of who knows where i'd be now.