The One Where I Talk About My Job

I am of the opinion that the show Friends was the very last show that both featured a laugh track and was actually funny. Sure, plenty of things about the show have aged somewhat poorly in the 30+ years since the show first aired, but it is undeniable that the show had a profound impact on the world. The characters of Friends started new trends in fashion (see: the "Rachel" haircut); the actors behind those characters set new trends in collective bargaining for pay (see: they were the first ensemble cast to equally receive $1 million per episode for the final two seasons of the show). There have even been linguistic studies on the "Bing-ification" of the English language, where a lot of the post-1990s speech pattern of Americans, when trying to be witty, emulate that of the character Chandler Bing, particularly in the "could this [noun] BE any more [adjective]?!" way. Having watched an episode of it as recently as yesterday, it's a show that still has a place in the world, even a whole generation removed.

One situation which I've always found very funny comes from the season four episode "The One with the Embryos," where the girls and the guys face off in a trivia game whose stakes begin relatively small but soon escalate. In the final moments of the game, Rachel and Monica are asked what appears to be a simple, straightforward question: what is Chandler's job? The girls find themselves at a loss, unable to name what exactly it is that Chandler does. It's a funny situation, but until a couple years ago, I found it to be a sort of silly one. After all, how hard is it to know what a person, who you're allegedly close to, does for a living?

Then I became a board game publisher, and all the sudden, no one really knows what I do! I mean, they know enough to know what my job title is, but when it comes to what I actually do...well, things get a little hazier.

I think a lot of the confusion stems from the fact that there aren't a lot of one-to-one comparisons to make between what I do and what someone else does. For a long time, my sister was a private school pre-K teacher, I was a public school elementary school teacher, and my wife was (and still is) a high school teacher. Though we never had each other's jobs, we all understood pretty well what went on at each other's workplaces. My brother-in-law is a CPA. I don't understand all the ins-and-outs of taxes, but I have confidence that I know what his job entails. There isn't a great comparative baseline to which board game publishing can be compared, so a lot of times it gets distilled down to something that's a little off the mark.

For instance, I sometimes get, "Oh, so you come up with the ideas for board games!" This is not entirely untrue. For instance, Galactic Cruise is a game I co-designed that I published. The remaining games in our current pipeline, though, aren't games that I had a hand in designing. (As a related note, I do always find the word "idea" to be funny, especially since if you go into any Facebook group for board games and say you have an "idea," you'll be flooded with comments letting you know that ideas are useless; but I get where people are coming from when they ask this question.) On the flip side, some people think that what comes to us is a fully-formed, ready-for-market product and we act as nothing more than the middleman for designers and manufacturers. This description, while grossly oversimplified, is a little closer to true.

So, what is it that I do? What does the job of board game publisher entail? It entails wearing a great many hats, and the hats worn from day-to-day and project-to-project are not always the same ones. To be a board game publisher is to be (or to find folks to be) the lead developer and play tester of a game, the curator of artists and graphic designers for a game, the marketing guru for the company and for the game in question, the architect of the crowdfunding page or pre-order page or whichever avenue the game will take to get from the hands of the publisher to the hands of the consumer, the customer service team, the tax payer, the language partner finder, the social media manager, the every-single-problem solver, and about a million other things.

So, yeah, in many ways the publisher is the middleman between the designer and the manufacturer. There is just a seemingly never-ending amount of "middle" to be manned.

Something that I think a lot of people don't realize -- I know I certainly didn't realize it until I was more within the industry -- is that board game companies, even some of the "big" ones, are tiny operations. Many publishers are single-person operations, so all those hats I mentioned earlier are worn by a single, solitary, and (I'm assuming) very tired person. At Kinson Key, we are lucky to have grown to a team of four, and we are very fortunate to be Allplay partners, which alleviates a lot of the logistic load, but there are many days where it seems like there is much too much to do. I honestly don't know how these companies of only one or two people do these things! Beyond that, we are a team of four who does this full-time; oftentimes, board game publishing is a job that is done part-time above and beyond an entire other full-time job. In many instances, it's a chunk of thankless work that has a razor thin profit margin for the publisher, yet the publisher endures because they love what they do. And, man, I love what I do.

This really is the greatest job in the world.

Even on days where pledge managers mess up and people are upset about Kickstarter practices, on days when there seems to be an endless parade of negative reviews, on days when we work a 12-to-16 hour day after having just worked a 12-to-16 hour day the day before, on days when everyone is pissed off and it's pretty much all your fault (or even when it's not your fault at all, but you're still getting the brunt of the pissed-offness), I can't help but say to myself:

Could this job BE any better?