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Stress

Your video game designer career manufactures its own peculiar brand of stress. First, your team members depend on you to invent or perfect a top-notch game. Of course, the game must be more outrageous and spectacular than the other games in the genre. It also must be better than your last one. No stress there, right?

Now let's assume you're swamped with deadlines. You've got a project completion deadline, and lots of smaller timeline-based goals you must meet along the way. Did we also mention you're fresh out of inspiration? You've been staring at the computer screen for hours, while all the characters from your previous games have banded together to mock you in unison. Extremely annoyed, you tune them out and inhale another bag of Doritos and a thirty-two-oz. Coke.

However, you'll also experience a good kind of stress, known as eustress. Let's say you've been working on an insane game for weeks, and your storyline is finally coming to a climax. The characters are meshing, the graphics are amazing, and the computer hasn't crashed in weeks. You're more and more jazzed by the prospect of finishing the best video game you can imagine. That excitement will carry you through the final push and over the finish line. That's the kind of stress you want.