Post Office Or Game Design Incubator?
I started what I thought would be a part-time gig as a letter carriers assistant, or LCA as it’s known, on the first day of the 2020 covid pandemic lockdown. It turned out to be an outrageous stroke of luck, managing to join the world of essential labour in the nick of time and sparing me months of lockdown. I credit the post office with saving my sanity, and marriage. I might be the first person for whom the term going postal applied in exactly the opposite way.
The post office runs on a clearly defined set of rules. In theory a letter carriers day is planned to the minute and lasts exactly 8 hours. There are strict guidelines about what a clerk does and does not do in a workday, and even stricter rules governing the behaviour of supervisors. On an average day it works well enough. In the early days of the covid-19 outbreak average days were in short supply. This is where the humble LCA comes in. The role is intentionally murky. Rigid systems break when unexpected things happen and in the universe of infinite possibilities where we all live, unexpected things happen every day. Things break. Dogs bite. Vans get flat tires. Sometimes a postie gets his eight-hour day done in five, sometimes it takes nine and a half. Someone must do the jobs that don’t fit within the precise definitions that are required to keep the peace in a workplace that is defined by it’s rigidity.
I thought I wanted to be a letter carrier. I liked the idea of going for a walk, whistling as I went, face to the sun, headphones on and doing the damn thing. I was disappointed to learn I’d be locked in a gray warehouse in North York, shouting distance from the boss. I wouldn’t find out how lucky I was until I learned what the reality of shlepping the mail was like. Being the LCA turned out to be a pretty good gig. Some days I’d drive around and change locks on mailboxes, assist with parcel clearing, sort mail for posties that had fallen behind, weigh and log admail, etc. Mostly I unloaded incoming parcels from the routes, sorted them into containers by class, and loaded them onto outgoing trucks for shipping to all points beyond.
Get Kyle Hollingdrake’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I experienced the unloading, sorting, and reloading of parcels as a complex game. It was resource management plus Tetris under time pressure with roguelike variables. Every day you had a rough idea of what to expect regarding incoming volumes, but you could never be sure. The containers that parcels were loaded into — “monotainers”, or mono for short — had to be collapsed and stored when not in use. There was limited floor space available, and the monos were unwieldy. You neither wanted to over-build or under-build them and they took time to set up so assembling them in the middle of a rush was a recipe for disaster. The parcels themselves came in 3 classes: standard (green), priority (yellow) and first class(red). A successful day relied on anticipating the number of each class of monos to be built and filled most efficiently with parcels, before being set aside for shipping. Once you had 40 monos filled, you loaded them into a 5-ton truck. Trucks came 3 times a day. On slow days you’d expect to send out about 80–90 monos. A full day was 120, and around Christmas we’d be calling in an overflow truck to get whatever was north of that number. It was a game within a game within a game. We wagered on the number of containers we would have to build. If we loaded our last deliveries before the end of our shift, we could go home early.
I knew there was the seed of a game in here somewhere, but at the time it seemed about as likely that I’d figure out how to build a time machine as I would learn how to grow it into a playable thing. I did a little cursory reading on forums that suggested I work it out on paper first and maybe learn a little C# or something. Too much for me to tackle at the time. I wasn’t ready to learn HOW to make a game yet, but I never stopped thinking about WHAT makes a game.
The post office is an environment that is all about systems, rules, rewards and punishments. It was practically built to incubate game design. There were guys there whose entire identity was gaming. How could they get their route done early and pick up some O.T.? How can you do the least and get the most. It’s just min-maxing for dollars.
6 years later, having learned a bare minimum of code and a subscription to the cheapest tier of Cursor, I am ready to embark on my game development journey. To do a little exploring. My expectations are low and my timelines are tight. I’ve got 9 weeks to get a prototype built and a case study written. I thought this was totally nuts, but I have a professor who assured me it’s absolutely doable.
Let’s find out.
