What happens when you leave structure behind? A journey through rewilding creativity, career shifts, and rediscovering joy in uncertainty.
I like the idea that when facing the unknown, what you need is a compass, not a map. I think I first came across that phrase in the work of Joi Ito and Jeff Howe. I’ve used it more than once to guide difficult decisions, especially in moments when certainty was nowhere to be found.
But I wasn’t raised that way. I grew up in the ’80s, and most of the stories I loved didn’t start with a compass — they started with a map. Torn, grubby, full of riddles and mystery. They pulled you away from the ordinary and into the wild — and if you were lucky, you came back changed.
That moment of decision has been on my mind lately because after years of working inside the structured world of multinational studios, I’ve found myself looking at my own crumpled map — and considering what I can learn from it.
The comfort — and cost — of certainty
I wasn’t aware of how much I’d been moulded by certainty until I stepped outside it. Outside the systems. Outside the cycle of project plans and performance reviews. More than I’d care to admit, outside the comforting rhythm of a monthly salary. That part’s not trivial. Years ago, I read Nassim Taleb’s line about salaries being the drug that keeps you from seeing the cage. I understood it intellectually and admired the cleverness of it. But I didn’t feel it, not properly, until I was out on my own1.
In my experience of large, multinational studios, creativity is held up as a central value. You’re encouraged to be bold, take risks, and think big. Every company says it, and I believe they mean it. They know, rightly, that creativity is what keeps the future viable. The speeches and mission statements are full of it.
But then comes the day-to-day. The KPIs and the tight deadlines. The need to fix things fast. Make things fast. The unspoken incentives. And suddenly, what gets reinforced is caution. Stick close to known ground. Don’t be first — be second, after someone else has proved it’s safe. If you must take a risk, make sure there’s evidence it’s worked before. Better yet, find someone who succeeded last time and borrow their slide deck.
Given time, a culture can guide you so firmly towards safety that the well-trodden path feels not just safer, but smarter—until you forget where you meant to go in the first place. And gradually, without even noticing, you begin to stay on them.
The rewilding begins
At first, it felt more like a void than a freedom. Without deadlines, stand-ups or roadmaps to react to, I was left with silence. And to be honest, that silence was loud. When you’ve spent years letting structure shape your days (not that it felt that way at the time), your choices, even your identity — the absence of it can feel like free-fall.
But slowly, things started to return. Not with a bang — more like muscle memory. A few days of following my nose again. A bit of curiosity creeping back in, uninvited but welcome. I started making things with no purpose. Exploring ideas I couldn’t pitch because I couldn’t explain them yet. Tools, prototypes, systems, little experiments that didn’t go anywhere — but they felt like mine. Work I knew would never be marked. Work that howled a bit, in its own wild way.
And it reminded me of the before time. Before all of this. When life itself felt a little more like a side quest. For me, the bit after the final exams, but before real responsibilities.
It reminded me of wandering Newcastle, or Los Angeles, following a stranger’s suggestion because it felt right. Of getting into games even though it wasn’t a “real job.” Of, on an interrailing trip across Europe, drinking too much in a Frankfurt bar instead of securing a hotel, and waking up half-lost and exhilarated rolling across the raised track into Venice, half-hungover, watching the sea swallow the rails as the city appeared like a hallucination. In each case I had all the knowledge and skills I needed. In each case it never quite felt like it at the time.
Unplanned things can go badly. Sometimes they are dangerous, or foolish, or wrong.
But, and I know this is reckless, sometimes they are brilliant. They stick. They give you feelings that last a lifetime.
And lately, I’ve remembered that’s where some creativity lives too.
The industry now: between acts
Rewilding’s having a moment, at least in the cultural imagination. Most of the metaphors follow a familiar pattern — vines crawling through concrete, nature reclaiming the city, mother earth breaking back through the asphalt etc. It’s dramatic. Cinematic. But that’s not how I’m feeling it.
To me, my rewilding doesn’t feel like chaos bursting through order. It’s quieter than that. Slower. Less about nature taking back space, and more about people waking up inside themselves. Like opening your eyes after a long sleep, blinking into the light. You were always there. You were always capable. You just forgot. Or got too focused, and forgot about the blinkers you chose to wear.
That’s what I see happening in the games industry right now. Not everywhere, not all at once — but in pockets. People are stepping outside the structures that shaped them, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity. And they’re realising they can do so much more than they were told. Or rather, more than they told themselves.
The conditions are rough, no question. Layoffs. Uncertainty. Projects vanishing. For some, it’s heartbreaking. For others, it’s a long-overdue change. But underneath all of it, I think there’s a quiet rewilding happening — not with vines and storms, but with slow, deliberate curiosity. A remembering.
And maybe that’s where the next phase of our industry begins.
Finding your own wild
Margaret Heffernan wrote that “uncertainty is where possibility lives.” Not the tidy kind of possibility, but the raw stuff — messy, unpredictable, and alive. I’m starting to believe that more and more.
If you’re in the middle of a transition — between jobs, between projects, between versions of yourself — maybe this is your rewilding moment. It might not feel like it. It might feel like failure, or stillness, or fear. But if there’s even a flicker of curiosity, that’s enough. That’s where it starts.
Try something people aren’t expecting. Build something no one asked for. Let yourself get it wrong. Follow the hunch, not the brief. You don’t need permission, not really. You probably never did.
So here’s to those slowly waking up again. The ones making things for the joy of it. The ones remembering why they started. The ones forging ahead without a tattered old map to follow — or maybe still holding onto it, just in case — but finally trusting the compass in their hand.
You’re not lost. You’re just rewilding.
- This is how it felt, but it wasn’t true. I’ve come to realise that, brilliantly, very few people are truly on their own, but I can empathise with those who feel that way at present. ↩︎
