Cuzzy Media Network CEO’s Blog

By Jason Latshaw

Many of us remember the days when our time was filled with playing a game or inhabiting an imaginary world. Unfortunately, the demands of a full-time career, family, and other responsibilities have since curtailed such flights of fancy.

But what if your career consisted of playing? There are many jobs that revolve around the concept of playing. And playing, whether it is for entertainment or therapy, is becoming an increasingly big business.
So if you’re someone who pines for the games and endless hours of fun from childhood, check out these four careers that pay you handsomely to play.

1. Toy and Game Designers: From initial sketches and computer concepts to the final prototype, designers of toys and games are involved in the whole process. Most toy and game designers are entrepreneurs who are skilled in pitching their ideas to toy and game companies. However, many also work in-house for those same companies. To become a toy and game designer, you need to be able to communicate your ideas visually, something you can learn with a creative degree program, like one in graphic design.

The Play: Toy and game designers get to play with prototypes while testing iterations and figuring out how to make everything more fun. Hours are dedicated to making sure the consumer (children of all ages) has the best possible time with the eventual released product.

The Pay: The U.S. Department of Labor maintains no salary figure specifically for toy and game designers. But as with other entrepreneurial jobs, the sky’s the limit if you have the skills and passion. For those designers employed by toy and game companies, SimplyHired.com reports that the annual mean wage is $53,000. Not bad for such a fun job.

2. Video Game Designers: The increasingly popular world of video games has created a number of new job opportunities, like video game designers, who influence many aspects of the game, including graphics, characters, animation, code, and design. To become a video game designer, look into video game design degree programs.

The Play: Despite the job title, it’s not all fun and games. There can be long hours and grueling work sessions to get the video games just right - especially when a ship date is looming. However, this is offset by the fact that you get to create worlds and characters, interact with them, and improve the playing experience until its perfect.

The Pay: According to Payscale.com, this popular career pays from $38,000 to $88,000 and upwards, depending on how many years of experience you have.

3. Recreational Therapists: You know that playing can be fun, right? But did you know it can be healing as well? Recreational therapists know this secret, and this growing field uses a large number of fun activities - games, arts and crafts, animal visits, sports, music, and more - to help people with disabilities and illnesses in a variety of ways.

To become a recreational therapist, a person normally completes an undergraduate degree in therapy or counseling.

The Play: Playing is a powerful part of many therapy programs and can be used to help people deal with depression, recover a wider range of motion, learn valuable skills, and more. And the fun part is - while helping and leading activities, you also get to participate in them as well.

The Pay: According to the U.S. Department of Labor, recreational therapists are paid a median of nearly $35,000.

4. Activities Directors: College campuses, cruise ships, vacation resorts, and even nursing homes and hospitals could all use activities directors to coordinate fun events. Aspiring activities directors can prepare for the role with a variety of degrees, including marketing, business, or hospitality - all programs which prepare people to work and organize large groups of people.

The Play: Activities directors coordinate games, meetings, events, and other forms of entertainment. The fun part: They often get to participate in all the fun and entertainment they plan and organize!

The Pay: or those who work at nursing homes, the median annual wage is nearly $35,000. For those leading activities on a cruise ship, pay can be up to $90,000, according to Salary.com.

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Hardly any big-budget movie goes by these days without an accompanying video game release — but the absence of a game based on Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight property is causing publishers to miss out on millions, according to British trade paper MCV.

“Given how hot a property it is, Twilight could easily present a seven-figure exploitation opportunity,” analyst Nick Gibson told the publication, “especially if publishers look at taking it beyond retail gaming and considers network gaming.”

Gibson goes on to suggest such a game would perform well with the broader audiences of the Nintendo’s Wii and DS machines, and would be unlikely to be targeted at gamers with Xbox 360s or PS3s.

“The brand’s appeal could actually extend significantly beyond the expected teen girl market and into the 20- to 30-year-old female market, which has a very substantial crossover into gaming,” he said.

So why have we not seen any serious attempt to bring Twilight’s vampires-and-werewolves world to consoles? It could simply be that the franchise owners haven’t realized what a big money-spinner it could be, Gibson told MCV.

“It may well be that the rights holders aren’t aware of the potential benefits as they haven’t explored the games market before,” he said. “It’s not unheard of – although it is increasingly unusual in this day and age.”

Movie-based games often score poorly with critics, but they’re a reliable hit with consumers. All the same, Twilight isn’t the only recent hot property to have missed out on a video game release: you’d have thought a game based on Oscar-winning Batman flick The Dark Knight would have been an obvious move, but it was not to be. Although publisher EA was working on such a title, it was canceled in 2008; a Newsweek article put the cost of the missed opportunity at over $100 million.

Would you play a video game based on the Twilight movie or novels? Let us know in the comments.

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“On the very day Toyota was making a high-profile defense of its cars, one of them was speeding out of control,” said CBS News–and a vast number of other media outlets worldwide. The driver of a 2008 Toyota Prius, James Sikes, called 911 to say his accelerator was stuck, he was zooming faster than 90 miles per hour and absolutely couldn’t slow down.

It got far more dramatic, though. The California Highway Patrol responded and “To get the runaway car to stop, they actually had to put their patrol car in front of the Prius and step on the brakes.” During over 20 harrowing minutes, according to NBC’s report, Sikes “did everything he could to try to slow down that Prius.” Others said, “Radio traffic indicated the driver was unable to turn off the engine or shift the car into neutral.” In fact, almost none of this was true. Virtually every aspect of Sikes’s story as told to reporters makes no sense. His claim that he’d tried to yank up the accelerator could be falsified, with his help, in half a minute. And now we even have an explanation for why he’d pull such a stunt, beyond the all-American desire to have 15 minutes of fame (recall the “Balloon Boy Hoax” from October) and the aching need to be perceived as a victim.

The lack of skepticism from the beginning was stunning. I combed through haystacks of articles without producing such needles as the words “alleges” or “claims.” When Sikes said he brought his car to a Toyota ( TM - news - people ) dealer two weeks earlier, recall notice in hand, and they just turned him away, the media bought that, too. In Sikes We Trust. Then the pundits deluged us with a tsunami of an anti-Toyota sanctimony .

Where to begin?

Well, the patrol car didn’t slow down the Prius; the bumpers never touched. The officers used a loudspeaker to tell Sikes to use the brakes and emergency brake together. He did; the car slowed to about 55 mph. Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a halt. He stopped the car on his own.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the transmission or the Prius engine button either.

Over a 23-minute period the 911 dispatcher repeatedly pleaded with Sikes to shift into neutral. He simply refused and then essentially stopped talking to her except to say that he thought he could smell his brakes burning.

“I thought about” shifting into neutral, Sikes said at a televised press conference the day after the incident. But “I had never played with this kind of a transmission, especially when you’re driving and I was actually afraid to do that.” Sikes, who has driven the car for two years, also said “I figured if I knocked it over [the gear knob] the car might flip.”

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Carlos Slim Helu thinks Latin America is poised for growth. That will be good for the poor–and for him.With more than 200 businesses, Carlos Slim Helu shapes virtually every industry under the Mexican sol. He’s got interests in telecom, retail, energy, tourism and banking.

Some folks in Mexico, where the average income is $13,200 (less than 0.0000003% of Slim’s $53.5 billion fortune), resent the mogul for being the richest man in the world. Slim has another take on commanding a staggering fortune. To him, it is a billionaire’s civic duty to leverage one’s resources into more wealth. “Wealth, either public or private, should be managed with efficiency, promoting through reinvestment economic growth,” he told Forbes Wednesday, the day our most recent list of the World’s Billionaires was released.

“Managing wealth means responsibility and commitment to create more wealth and, through more employment and the generation of tax revenues, boost the distribution of the fruits–that is, of income.”

Those fruits will likely multiply in the coming decade, as global capital continues to shift to emerging markets, particularly China and Latin America. Slim is bullish on his region, hypothesizing that the great influx in wealth will elevate Latin America, pulling more people out of poverty.

Slim’s bold prediction for the decade: “Latin America is close to breaking the underdevelopment barrier, of around $12,000 of income per capita. It seems to me that this should happen in the next 10 years.” He continues: “The developing countries in Latin America have available both internal and external financial resources, better terms of trade on their exports of primary goods and competitive advantages thanks to the availability and production of commodities, tourism and a modern industrial sector.”

Not everyone is as bullish. After several decades of tepid growth, Latin America’s economy is expected to expand between 3% and 4.5% in 2010.

The more optimistic economists, however, argue that the region’s growth will be buttressed by a multitude of factors weighing in Latin America’s favor. Unlike its more developed counterparts, the region only experienced collateral damage from the credit crunch. “Latin America has bounced back strongly,” says Jerome Booth, head of research at Ashmore Investment Management. “Latin America’s banks are already taking market share from U.S. and European competitors.” That’s more good news for Slim, who has a 55% stake in Inbursa Bank, one of Mexico’s largest financial firms.

Slim says the dichotomy between the developed and emerging worlds will be amplified in the coming years, as developed economies continue to wrestle with their “financial systems, fiscal and financial deficits and their transition to a society of advanced services in which excessive imports of goods are not compensated by other revenues and have to be financed by foreign savings.”Slim did not say which of his holdings he believes will outperform in Latin America’s emergence. But regardless of whether it’s telecom or energy that drives Slim’s portfolio to $60 billion and beyond, the Latin American growth story will present great opportunity and challenge for the world’s richest man as he navigates a rapidly changing marketplace with more sophisticated competitors.

As Nick Chamie, the global head of emerging markets research for Royal Bank of Canada, puts it, “It’s not so much how Slim affects Latin America, it’s much more about recognizing that the development of Latin American nations will have a greater affect on Carlos Slim.”

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For the third time in three years, the world has a new richest man.

Riding surging prices of his various telecom holdings, including giant mobile outfit America Movil ( AMX - news - people ), Mexican tycoon Carlo Slim Helu has beaten out Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the wealthiest person on earth and nab the top spot on the 2010 Forbes list of the World’s Billionaires.

Slim’s fortune has swelled to an estimated $53.5 billion, up $18.5 billion in 12 months. Shares of America Movil, of which Slim owns a $23 billion stake, were up 35% in a year. That massive hoard of scratch puts him ahead of Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) cofounder Bill Gates, who had held the title of world’s richest 14 of the past 15 years.

Gates, now worth $53 billion, is ranked second in the world. He is up $13 billion from a year ago as shares of Microsoft rose 50% in 12 months. Gates’ holdings in his personal investment vehicle Cascade ( CAE - news - people ) also soared with the rest of the markets. Buffett’s fortune jumped $10 billion to $47 billion on rising shares of Berkshire Hathaway ( BRK - news - people ). He ranks third.

The Oracle of Omaha shrewdly invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs ( GS - news - people ) and $3 billion in General Electric ( GE - news - people ) amid the 2008 market collapse. He also recently acquired railroad giant Burlington Northern Santa Fe ( BNI - news - people ) for $26 billion.

In his annual shareholder letter Buffett wrote, “We’ve put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.”

Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year’s wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year.

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