Crushing the Dreams of Would-Be Game Designers
After the stupidly naive wide-eyed dreams of the suckers Collins College tries to woo in their ads...



... Comes the soul-crushing despair of reality in the good ol' Triple-A Mainstream Videogame Industry:

What They Don't Tell You on the Game Design Job Description

Now, while the above article is a little whiney, bitter, and exaggerated (as it should be for proper entertainment effect), it's also more-or-less true. I read a couple of bits to the guys at work (one of whom is a designer), and they nearly fell out of their chairs laughing. And we're at a pretty good company which takes game design seriously.

If you want to work on your own game, your own masterpiece, and show the world your uncompromised and unadulterated Vision(tm), go indie. It'll be hard on your wallet, and even harder on your ego, but the channels are wide open in this day and age to get your vision out to the people. There's simply never been a better time. Unfortunately, you won't have many excuses other than "lack of budget" when it becomes clear that nobody else thinks you are Stanley Kubrick, either.

If you want a steady paycheck in a 9-to-5 (or, too often, 10-to-10) job as a game designer for a major publisher, well, here's the deal (speaking in vague generalities, as every studio and publisher is different): As a "game designer" 80% of your job is that of a glorified tech writer. Most of the remaining 20% of your job is to attend meetings and to make hard decisions like, "What features do we cut to make milestone," and "How blue should this control be?" and "should there be a particle effect in the idle animation when the troll scratches his butt?" Oh, and repeat what you've already written in the game design document, because your lead programmer vaguely remembers seeing it somewhere but he is too lazy to go look it up now and knows a ton has changed since it was last updated and you are sitting RIGHT THERE (~~~ ahem --- guilty as charged, your honor...)

Because really - when you get hired by a game company to design games, you are being hired to MAKE THEM MONEY. And in all seriousness - they do want you to be creative and to have vision and all that. They really did hire you for your creativity. But it's like hiring someone to detail your car or landscape your yard. You want them to have vision, and to express themselves creatively and do something cool. You want to draw upon their experience and passion and come up with something that you both love. But they've got to do it within the bounds that you set, and meet the goal you hired them to achieve. They may really have a passion for drawing fat naked men eating grapes on the moon --- and hey, that's great for them. But I don't want to drive around town with that painted on the side of my car.

So maybe my soul has already been crushed, and I have become The Man. Maybe my mercenary attitude is the reason so many game designs seem stale and tired today. And maybe it's just the fact that I love giving the designer on my team a hard time.

Thanks to GameSetWatch for the link!

Labels: Game Design, Mainstream Games

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