As even more of you certainly already know, job hunting is no easy task, for anyone, much less someone who fears customers like the zombies they so resemble in the mornings and whose soul belongs irrevocably to this mad endeavor of fiction and to her partner therein.
The search for a suitable nine-to-five desk chair where I can daydream while putting my obsessive-compulsive tendencies to bread-winning use naturally has me reading a lot of varyingly ominous job ads at the moment. Optimists that we are, Matt and I have decided to cheer ourselves up this Thanksgiving month with lists of the five fictional jobs whose ads we’re most thankful that I won’t have to answer.
You can read his list as it unfolds on his blog here.
At number five on my list, Strategy Game Scout Unit.
Must be able to run at a minimum of 20 mph and be comfortable working independently and WITHOUT showboating. 20/10 vision required!
This is a full-time position with significant mandatory overtime. Paid travel and tasteful funeral provided. Sorry, no weapons permitted.
Okay, strategy games don’t look like a whole lot of fun for anyone other than the players. At best, depending on the style of game, the other characters get to be contented boring citizens who occasionally complain about little things like poor farmland, low educational standards, and encroaching barbarian hordes. But of all the common types of units, Scouts have to have it the worst.
Sure, everyone’s fair game for suicide missions in strategy games, but Scouts are specifically designed to, well, scout, in universes where the knowledge of all units is instantly transmitted to the player in the sky. Coming back alive to share the acquired information is in no way necessary to a Scout unit’s job.
Now, let’s say they don’t mind that part. Let’s pretend all the characters in strategy games live in a Klingon-esque world, eager and excited to fight and die for the empire. It’s certainly a lot more fun to play that way. Even then, the Scouts still have the worst job, the one that doesn’t actually involve any fighting. That’s not what they’re supposed to be good at. In many games they can’t do it at all.