by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

When I was twenty-three, I attended my first Marriott corporate holiday party.

It was a formal affair, and though I enjoy wearing a tuxedo, I will never forget how godawfully boring the “party” was. Hour after hour of droning company awards acceptances, until everyone in the room had lost the will to live. Sure, I was Rookie of the Year, the new hotshot, the youngest star in the company, smashing records, saluted by my peers and superiors…and it was boring.

Aside from the fact that I was the only twentysomething in the ballroom — and single at the time, which made things even more awkward — it became clear that these people and their shared beliefs were worlds apart from where I was coming from.

This is not a matter of enculturation or class. This is a matter of being a stranger in a strange land. They were (and are) good people; they just weren’t people I could relate to.

Even as I climbed the ranks through the years — to the point where I was responsible for sales operations at half of Marriott’s residence clubs in the Hawaii region before I transferred to the Ritz-Carlton division — I never could quite shake that feeling of just not fitting in.

My boss. At work.

If there’s one thing I love — really love — about having shifted from resort development to game development in the last year, it’s that I feel much more at home with the people I work with. My coworkers in the hospitality industry looked down upon my gaming habits as though I was some sort of overgrown child; my current coworkers simply share the same passion.

So we come to the annual LOOT holiday party — my first holiday party in the gaming industry.

Wow.

It’s still a bit of a culture shock. Marriott’s corporate dress code and rules of personal conduct, without exaggeration, date back to the social mores of the 1950’s. On one hand, there are benefits to this — for one thing, if you don’t have a top-notch work ethic and quickly learn how to work with people in a properly formal business context, you don’t survive — but it can be a bit of a straitjacket. Meanwhile, at LOOT, it’s just a full-blown animal house.

If anyone asks, I really, really like the gaming industry. This is far more fun.

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