The other day, while investigating potential fodder for this column at my favorite bookstore, I noticed the tremendous number of self-help titles in the high-priced hardcover sections. Books designed to let ordinary people improve their personal finances, age gracefully, or change their outlook on life with the assistance of all sorts of alternative medicines, diets, self-hypnosis techniques and supernatural powers. An entire industry, in fact, devoted to telling people that failure (any failure) is an abomination, and teaching them how to avoid it at all costs.

And then, in a dark corner, I found The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection, a lovely book compiled by Wendy Northcutt which, in the publisher's own words, honors "those who continue to improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it in a supremely idiotic fashion."

Meeting a gruesome death while trying to achieve something that had no business being attempted in the first place: now, THAT's failure.

The Darwin Awards have saluted the world's dumbest since at least 1995; here are some examples, drawn from their official website:

Compared to that, none of the ways in which we game developers could possibly humiliate ourselves seem overly meaningful, do they?

Still, even though the consequences are never so grave, failure is a common fact in our lives. Projects get canned. Highly anticipated games that come out to glowing reviews in the press nevertheless fail to find an audience and disappear with a heartbreaking whimper. Development companies close their doors, sometimes without anything close to a justification.

I have been working in this business for over a decade, and I'd be willing to bet that most of you wouldn't recognize more than two of the twenty-odd titles I have worked on over the years - and that doesn't even take into account the innumerable canceled projects even I have forgotten about. Yet, most of the time, I feel pretty good about what I've been able to achieve, and not merely because of low expectations. My solution to the dilemma: I judge myself according to criteria that are entirely within my control.

For better or for worse, game development is a part of the entertainment industry, and its benchmarks for success have been applied here as well as in movies, TV or print publishing. Thus, we have often been guilty of measuring ourselves by money (sales figures), fame (achieving recognition in the general public) or peer approval (gaining the respect of fellow developers).

Unfortunately, as measures of individual achievement, all of them are flawed, because the causal relationship between personal contribution and sales, fame or peer recognition is at best indirect and at worst nonexistent.

First, the money argument. We all know that a game's sales depend on a million factors outside of our control - our teammates' effectiveness, our publishers' ability to create anticipation about the game in the marketplace and to distribute it at the right time, the specific tastes of a handful of reviewers, the economic landscape, etc.

Then, let us look at fame. In our business, not only is it fickle, but it is also largely irrelevant. Whereas moviegoers can assume a certain style and level of quality when they see names such as Ron Howard or Tom Hanks on the marquee, individual developers rarely if ever have that kind of impact on a game because of the team dynamics involved in creating interactive entertainment. (It should also be noted that some of the most celebrated game developers in the world, like Sid Meier and John Carmack, are notoriously reclusive and seem to place little value in celebrity for its own sake.)

Finally, let us consider peer approval. While being recognized as quality craftspeople by our fellow developers is a worthy goal in itself, the question is: How? Scientists have journals for every subdivision of a subspecialty; we have one to cover the entire industry, plus a handful of web sites and (at last count) four book collections - and the book industry's economics make it really hard to justify devoting enough time and effort to write your own, unless you happen to benefit from a depressed Canadian dollar's exchange rate like I do. Similarly, other fields have myriads of conferences and trade shows where every Tom, Dick and Harry can present their work; we have the GDC, its European and Australian counterparts, and precious little else.

I truly believe that relying on measures of success that depend on the contribution or opinion of others is a bad idea. (Dismissing failures by blaming them on others is hardly more appropriate, even though it can be, in a perverse sort of way, even more satisfying than success.)

The solution is to define challenges for ourselves that we can meet, or fail to meet, strictly on our own.

For "depth-first" types, who like to focus on one thing at a time and excel at it, this means going after the most elegant algorithms, most beautiful artwork, highest polygon count, perfect dialogue, etc. These people tend to be happier in larger, stable companies where this type of specialization can be fostered. For "breadth-first" jack-of-all-trades who prefer to dabble in a little of everything, this can mean working as a problem-solving producer, contributing to a variety of projects as a freelancer, or starting their own studios. Either way, measuring our professional success by how happy how work makes us seems far healthier than any of the alternatives.

(Unfortunately, many of the freelancing assignments available in the gaming business are targeted towards the highly specialized folks least likely to want to deal with the hassle of running their own businesses, while companies constantly pressure happy specialists into becoming unhappy managers, but that's a topic for another rant.)

My approach may seem incredibly cheesy in a pop psychology kind of way, but I believe that it is the one most likely to help us maintain our sanity. If what I want is X, and I let outside pressures influence me into calling myself an abject failure even if I achieve X, just because of some Y factor I neither care about nor have any control over, I might as well give up now and lock myself in the loony bin.

As an industry, we know instinctively that money and fame are poor measures of individual ability; the old saying about developers having no trouble finding work when they've been through a complete product cycle, no matter what the product achieved in the marketplace, is proof enough. I believe that applying the same principles to our self-evaluations would help us direct our lives in ways more compatible with our true natures.