You might have a full-time job. You might be taking a full course-load at school. You may spend all day grinding up MMORPG characters to sell off on eBay. Whatever the reason, you're busy.

In your limited free time, you've got this game that you're planning. It sounded awesome at first, and you were just bubbling over with ideas and a desire to present your vision to a large group of players. But the development period just kept getting stretched further and further out. You're looking a commitment of possibly years once you get started running. And the more you nail down in preparation for the game, the less vast potential you see in the setting.

If you could just write and plan the game as your inspiration allowed, you'd be fine. But your fellow staff members expect you to produce and to produce on a schedule.

You're burning out.

What can you do to stop the process, or at least slow it down?

Keeping Your Enthusiasm
"I'm devoid of floon."

Floon is a term used in some of the LARPing communities in the eastern US. Someone whose floon is said to be high is enthusiastic about gaming, while someone low in floon has allowed various factors to reduce this enthusiasm. For a player, low floon means lack of desire to attend games. For a staff member, low floon can mean lack of inspiration to run and write them.

Think about your day job. When you haven't had a vacation for a while, you've been doing thankless tasks for weeks, and you've just gotten another boring assignment, how good of a job are you going to do with it? Your enthusiasm is low, so your work will likely be the minimum that you can force yourself to do. Now compare that to a time when you're energized, well-treated, and given an interesting project. The interesting project will probably turn out much better even if it's of the same difficulty as the boring one.

Working on a game is no different. If you've lost interest and enthusiasm in what the team is doing, you're going to be putting in the minimum of effort towards everything you do.

This is something of a downward spiral. As your work suffers and slows down, it's going to take even longer to move to the next stage in the project. You'll be bored for longer, and your work may suffer even more. If things get truly bad, the staff may burn out from lack of floon before the project moves to something of more interest to everyone.

What can you do about it?

If you're not enthusiastic about the game, chances are that you've lost track of what grabbed your interest in the first place. Did you look forward to amazing tales of fantastic deeds and then find yourself hung up on writing the minutia of the setting? Did you envision creating the perfect rules system but find yourself using the same old engine since nobody else thought rules were important? Did you really enjoy designing the setting but find yourself less interested in using it to weave plots?

Talk to the rest of the staff about what you'd rather be doing. They may need you to slog on for a while on your current projects, but ought to consider changing the focus to keep you contributing. That may mean switching your role on the team. It may mean switching the design to move some more interesting things next in the whole team's process. It may mean working in time to revisit areas that were theoretically complete because you still want to work on them.

Think about what it is that you're excited about, and work with the rest of the team to make those interesting things more obtainable. You may not enjoy every aspect of what the staff needs you to do when designing a game, but you need something to look forward to.

Finding Your Balance
"I notice that a third of us are writing 95% of the plot for this event. Does that seem fair?"

Of course, your enthusiasm might be fine; it's just your workload that's the problem. If your creative flame is burning brightly, it may just be consuming the creative fuel at a faster rate. If you're demanding that it heat the whole house, you may not make it through the winter. I think this metaphor got away from me; nevertheless, if you do more than you can handle on a regular basis, you may get to the point that you can't do anything.

It may just be an issue of perception: you feel like you're doing too much simply because you feel like others aren't doing enough. In creative endeavors, perception often might as well be reality. You're not burning out because you're overworked; you're burning out because you're overworked relative to everyone else.

This angle is fairly easy to deal with, though it involves a potentially accusatory conversation. Just ask the rest of the staff what they're doing that balances out what you're doing. Maybe they hadn't realized that you're feeling overworked, and will be happy to take more of the load. Maybe they're feeling powerless to help on the current development stage, but plan to make up for it as soon as something plays to their strengths. Maybe they're just lazy and need a kick to get started.

But it might not be perception. Maybe you're actually working past your own limits of creativity, whether or not you feel like the rest of the staff is doing their share. Even if they were all killing themselves to create an awesome game, you would still be just as out of ideas.

Chances are that the rest of the staff isn't all at their limit, however. In a situation where you genuinely feel like you're burning out from a non-relative point of view, the staff can still probably take up some of the slack. In this case, though, they're not doing more to make you feel better about your own workload; they're actually taking work from you. If you're doing more than you can handle, you should be able to pass some off to those that are doing less than they're capable of.

This type of transfer has to be balanced delicately. If everyone else on the staff is already making a full contribution, reducing the chance of burnout on one member may just increase it on another. Every single member of staff that can contribute at the current stage may be floating at their point of maximum contribution, without any leeway to move the responsibilities very far.

In this case, your best bet is to adjust your schedule. Yes, you're trying to get the game ready to start right after con season or you've already told the players there will be one more game this spring. But if everyone is burning out, it may be better to risk moving your dates instead of delivering a compromised product. Sometimes, the only way to reduce the creative load on the staff is to give everyone more time to deal with it.

Identifying Your Stressors
"I've got an eight page research paper due for finals, I have to find a summer job, my family's going on vacation without me, and I have to run a game at the end of the month. How are you?"

I read about a creativity study recently; it proposed that individuals that paid more attention to their environments were more creative. These people are believed to have a greater store of visuals, ideas, and impressions, gathered from years of attention, that they can draw from and recombine into works of art. I'm not sure I agree with all the conclusions of the study, but I think the basic idea makes sense: creativity is rarely about birthing ideas from the void of your mind but is, instead, about drawing on your experiences in original ways.

This is all to say that, simply, creativity is intimately tied to the rest of your life. You can't separate the part of your life that is creative from your day-to-day existence.

Obviously, thousands and thousands of words could be written on this subject, and they probably have been. From a gestalt standpoint, though, it means that you can't discount your personal life when considering how you feel about your game. Your ability to be creative in your game development is based on everything that's going on with you that initially seems distinct from the game.

Are you unhappy about your job or education? Are you having complications in your personal relationships? Are you in debt? Are there people that you don't want to see that you know are coming to the game? Are you working out a complicated moral or ethical conundrum?

Conversely, are you really excited about your job and putting in a lot of effort? Are you having a great time exploring your friendships or romance? Are you trying to figure out what to do with a windfall of cash? Are you working on half a dozen other creative projects? Are you focused on lots of positive changes happening in your life?

All of these things are stressors, whether good or bad. All of them might have an impact on your creative levels. They're not related to your workload on the game at all, but they affect how much effort and originality you can contribute. It's no good to carefully trim the wick at the top of the candle to optimize the flame if there's a bright fire hungrily burning from the bottom.

So how do you keep from burning out on the game if your creativity is being actively reduced by a myriad of external sources? It will be hard, but there are a few possibilities: You can make an effort to put your other worries out of your mind when you think about the game. You can think of ways to turn your stressors from drain to inspiration by incorporating the situations and emotions into your work. You can attempt to think of your creative efforts as an entertaining release from your stress rather than another task you have to perform.

But stress is an overwhelmingly powerful force, and its effects on your creativity may be insurmountable. Let the rest of the staff know that you need to deal with the rest of your life before you can contribute fully to the game. Use the time you would have spent on the game on actions that will reduce your stress levels.

If all goes well, you'll use the break to have a ton of new experiences that will refresh your creative fuel. Fortunately, once your creativity is all burned up it doesn't mean that you can't replenish it in time.

That's it for now on money and motivation. The next two columns will focus more on the practical ends of getting your game ready to run.