Cast of Characters pt 1 : the Burnout
If you want to work in the games industry, know that it is filled with geeky guys. Be prepared to put up with a certain amount of ‘eccentricities.’ In this series, I offer up a sampling of the types of people you might meet in your journey.
The first personality I’d like to talk about is the “Burnout”, which technically you won’t meet in the games industry since he has already left it. A Burnout is someone who has worked as a developer for many years and then leaves the industry entirely.
Working in as a game developer can be an unforgiving and thankless job, so some turn over is to be expected, but one group in particular seems to be susceptible to becoming a Burnout, the programmers.
I’ve seen some of the programmers I respect the most quit the industry. The artists seem leave to do other things regardless of their time in the industry, but programmers seems to hit a rough patch after seven or more years in the industry and start dropping out.
As I stated in my first post, I recently quit working at 2K Boston after working in the games industry for only five years. However, I wouldn’t count myself as a burnout, because I still want to continue to make games. I would say one of the reasons I quit was to avoid becoming a Burnout.
Every
I wouldn’t suggest quitting your job as a good way of avoiding burning out, but I did what I had to. So I’ll avoid giving any career advice, but beware of the Burnout and try to avoid becoming one yourself.
I Didn’t Join the Video Games Industry to Make Glorified Random Number Generators
about 3 years ago - Comments Off
I said that last night while discussing the state of Flash/Facebook games with my friend David. Cracked.com has a great article explaining some of the techniques video games use to keep players engaged. Notice that I said engaged, not entertained. They are two different things. Games used to want players to have fun so they More >
How iPad Multitasking Might Work
about 3 years ago - Comments Off
There has been much complaining on the web about how iPad doesn’t support multitasking, and little analysis of why Apple doesn’t allow it. Adam C. Engst wrote up a great analysis of the types of benefits that multitasking can provide and what technology is required to achieve those benefits. I’d like to approach the question More >
Game Developers Are From Mercury and Marketing Is From Neptune
about 4 years ago - Comments Off
One of the big bogeymen in stories that developers tell each other is the “Marketing Department.” The story always ends up the same way, “and then we had to change the game … for the worse.” If you read any developer’s blogs, it is clear that most don’t hold marketing in high esteem. They are More >
Learning from Alan Kay, 11 years later
about 4 years ago - 5 comments
I first saw this video on reddit about a year ago, a famous talk by Alan Kay given about 11 years ago. I’ve watched it many times and each time understanding it a bit more. [googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521[/googlevideo] The first time I watched it, I found his proposal that every object on the internet should have an More >
Why the Games Industry Needs E3
about 4 years ago - Comments Off
Apprently it is news to some people that E3 is dead. I wrote my own eulogy to E3 a couple of month ago, around the time E3 is suppose to take place. The real E3, not whatever just happened last week. E3 was important to the industry because it represented gaming as a “Culture” and More >
Cast of Characters pt 2 : the Broken
about 4 years ago - Comments Off
If you want to work in the games industry, know that it is filled with geeky guys. Be prepared to put up with a certain amount of ‘eccentricities.’ In this series, I offer up a sampling of the types of people you might meet in your journey. Last time I talked about the ‘Burnout’, this More >
Make Better Games by Reducing Interactivity
about 4 years ago - Comments Off
Most people believe that interactivity is what separates games from other kinds of media, so how can you make games better by taking away that advantage? Back when we were creating the interface on BioShock, Ken was the one who always pushed for a simpler interface. The main method we used was to remove options More >
Why Sky High Development Budget is Good for Publishers
about 4 years ago - Comments Off
The cost of developing a game has increased exponentially over the past few years. The first game I worked, ‘The Punisher,’ had a development budget of six million dollars. I would say that’s in the middle range of development cost during that time. Nowadays, just marketing a high profile game will cost that much, with More >
The Games Industry Needs More Competence Not ‘Innovation’
about 4 years ago - 4 comments
One of the perennial complaints leveled against the games industry is that the industry is ‘Stagnant’ and needs more ‘Innovation.’ I’ve fallen into that train of thought myself a couple of years ago during the period known as ‘The Time of Brown Military Shooters.’ Gradually, I came to another realization, what I really want to More >
Dear Developers: button layout loading screens must go
about 4 years ago - 4 comments
I recently downloaded a bunch of demos from the Playstation Store to check out some of the games I’ve missed. After playing through a bunch of them, I noticed that all of them included a loading screen that tells you what each of the buttons do, the “Button Layout” screen. Here is an example of More >
Comments are closed.
about 4 years ago
Good post. I couldn’t hack it with that constant pressure. Or I should say I hacked it, but at great personal expense. It remains to be seen whether I’m a burnout or not.
Unlike Lida, I will give some career advice (less experienced though I am): only work for companies with a proven high quality of life standard. The games industry is able to continue to wallow in its immaturity because of the constant influx of bushy-eyed and wide-tailed talent fighting to get in. They won’t get better unless we force them to.
If you can’t find a suitable point of entry, then start your own company. You honestly couldn’t do any worse management or process-wise than most of them do.