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February 28, 2009
Getting In
From time to time, I get emails or questions about how to get into the industry; usually, these are from friends of friends, friends of family, the wider network of people I don't know directly but to whom I have only a degree of separation. A few weeks ago I got just such a request from a friend who teaches high school English, and then his student got in touch this week with a few questions. He's looking at getting into the game development business in a few years (after finishing schooling), and after a preamble asked the following three questions:
- How did you get into the industry? I guess this would be most important to me right now, given that I only have the next four years to prepare.
- What sorts of things have you found to be most essential in the development of games you have worked on?
- Is there anything that you did in particular to get yourself taken seriously? I would certainly like to find myself, at least eventually, in a position to be able to persuade a co-worker or peer to approach a project from my point of view, as it seems you have accomplished.
In the interests not of putting off these questions in the future, but of not repeating myself too much and giving anyone else interested a starting point, I asked the young man if he'd be alright with me posting my somewhat edited response here. He was, and so here it is:
There are a million roads into game development; basically everyone I've met has gotten in a different way. I'm an engineer, so I have a particular lens which might be different from yours if you are interested in design, but I'll tell you a bit about what I do and how I got to where I am.
I started gaming when I was 8 or so -- though it was obviously different from the sorts of games you've been playing in the last ten years or so. I started out playing text adventures on a mainframe -- my father would bring home a dumb terminal from his job at a defense contractor and we'd tie up the phone line for hours, pouring out 14-inch wide green-and-white paper onto the floor as we made our way through caves and bizarre rooms and avoided a thieving dwarf. When I was 10 or 11, we got our first home computer -- an Apple II+ with 48K of memory (later expanded to an amazing 64K) -- on which I wrote my first games (as well as my first 3D renderer - in wireframe). These were usually text-based, though some had primitive graphics. I picked up BASIC, of course, and even a little bit of assembly and a variant of Forth, but I stopped programming much in the way of games or anything on my computer probably by the time I was 14.
I ended up going to college for a degree in the humanities (physics and philosophy) and decided in my senior year to look for something different. I had always enjoyed computers, so I thought about going to get an advanced degree in that since physics had turned out not to be for me and I already knew what people thought of stand-up philosophers. I got a masters and was on my way to get a doctorate when I decided that an academic life wasn't really for me. So I cast around for something else, and discovered that in the years I hadn't been doing much gaming, it had grown from being a garage business to big business. I thought it might make a fine career.
I didn't know anyone in game development, but I had played some games on occasion over the years and was a fan of the LucasArts adventure games¹. I received some good advice from a friend that when I was applying for a job with a company, it was a good idea to find someone in that company that you admire and contact him, as well as sending it to the HR department. So I sent Tim Schafer (then of Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island fame) a letter and my résumé, and then followed up with a call a week later. I was going out to the Bay Area anyway to talk with someone else about a job, and asked if I could take Tim to lunch while I was there, so I could pick his brain about getting into game development.
When I turned up in San Francisco, he had set up not just lunch with himself but interviews, which led ultimately to a job as a senior programmer writing the gameplay systems for Star Wars: Starfighter. I have been amazingly lucky in my career thus far, and that was certainly the start. Never did get to work with Tim, though I still await his releases with bated breath². Maybe some day.
Anyway, that's how I got in. The advice I received about finding someone in an organization whose work you really respect was excellent advice, and helped me a lot. I might have gotten a job anyway... but perhaps not. One never knows.
I can recommend a few general guidelines for getting in down the road, once you've gone to school. The first is college... go and get a degree in something that can hold your interest for four years. But experiment, too -- make sure you try a variety of stuff, you never know what might be grist for the creative mill later. There'd be no harm in some introductory psychology, and a whole lot of reading -- personally, I think I have grown immensely through the contact with minds far greater than my own reading the classics provides. Ultimately, to be able to learn to communicate and persuade, you need to practice -- write papers, do research, argue and debate. All the stuff you'd do in college no matter what you want to do later; but learn to think in specifics, not the big hand-wavy "and magic happens" we still see in design documents and discussions from time to time.
At the same time, it's probably worthwhile to keep playing games. But you can't just play them to play them, you have to play like a designer. Take them apart with your brain, analyze how the systems go together, how the various game mechanics reinforce one another (or don't). (As an graduate student in engineering I encountered Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and spent an inordinate time thinking about how I would design the C++ object hierarchy, or solve the various search problems they had.) Think about failures as well as successes. Read books on game design (there are a few good ones -- I like Rules of Play and have been reading Challenges for Game Designers as well). But when you think about games, think about why they entertain you -- if you are just being entertained, you're not doing it right ;) There isn't a games equivalent of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, as far as I'm aware, but that sort of close reading is useful.
Finally, build games. You don't have to be a programmer to make games. You can make board games and card games. You can prototype that way, or make games that are meant to be played that way. Don't limit yourself... people who only play games are boring (and don't come up with interesting games or game themes). While you can't prototype certain types of videogames very well with pen-and-paper, such as shooters, you can still think about the interactions of systems that way.
None of this needs to be expensive -- you can often get enough of a game's design from its demo. You can build card games with decks of cards and some adhesive paper to stick onto them. There used to be a whole company devoted to making games cheaply -- you just had to supply the tokens and dice and stuff like that, they'd supply a cheap card stock board -- called Cheap Ass Games. If you're familiar with it, you can try stuff out in Flash, or in Flex, or in whatever other crazy things they have these days. Most colleges have student editions of software at a deep, deep discount for students, I bought my first C++ compiler this way.
I think that if you've been doing those things, you'll be taken seriously. Frankly, you'll need to pay your dues before you can be expected to be taken too seriously. But being in game development is great fun, offers lots of interesting challenges, and so paying those dues should be interesting. If you have passion for it, and work hard, you'll progress well. The best way to convince anyone of your seriousness is to work hard; producing good work is the only sure path to success. I've been successful not because of my big ideas of things I'd like to do down the road but because I've worked hard to make the projects I was part of a success by focusing on what needed to be done now. Being the best you can be at what you're doing right that moment is the best you can do... and it will open doors. If you have a game you want ultimately to make, you should keep it in mind and enrich it with your work over the years, and maybe some day you'll get to make it. But the only way to get that to happen is to work your hardest on whatever you're doing, and to take on additional responsibilities as long as you can do a good job of them as well. I don't say this to discourage, but rather to encourage -- take your energy and enthusiasm and invest it in your projects, and it will pay off. You may be able to make the game you want to make, or not, to be honest. Ideas are important, but they are only the seed; it takes a lot more to make a good game. Your energy and effort will be what leads to you having authority to persuade co-workers. Your effort and energy and results *are* your credentials. Even when I have been faced with projects or tasks I didn't believe in or agree with, I tried my hardest to make them work. I have been lucky in that these have been few.
¹These were not, of course, the only games I had played by any stretch. I also had a fondness for Ultima games and the occasional console title. I investigated a lot of companies. (back)
²Daron Stinnett, my boss for many years and a friend for more than a decade now, was kind enough to indulge me when I told him I probably wouldn't be getting much work done the week that Grim Fandango came out. I also waited until Psychonauts was released to get an Xbox. I'll probably by my next next-gen system when Brutal Legend finally releases. (back)
³I happen to have, somewhere, a stack of uncut cardstock for the Magic: the Gathering release that would become Invasion, though we called it Spectral Chaos. I also playtested what became Ice Age and it was made with paper stuck to common alphas like lands and walls of wood. That's how Richard made the original sets -- just existing decks of cards or card stock; he refined the mechanics with that. (back)
Posted by Brett Douville at February 28, 2009 09:47 PM