This post is maybe a bit premature, but I wanted to talk about some of my potential plans once I graduate.
First of all, I really enjoy the academic setting. If you watch Extra Credits—please, please do if you have any interest in Game Design—you may have seen the episode where they discuss post-secondary Game Design education. Hundreds of people like me are graduating every few months with formal Game Design experience. This wasn't a thing ten years ago, and with game companies and publishers becoming enormous—with their triple-a titles now costing tens of millions of dollars—these companies are less willing to take risks on innovation. So where does innovation live?
At school.
You can also find it in the minds and skills of thousands of awesome indie designers out there, including more than a few entrepreneurial indie development houses. But school brings together dozens of passionate idea people and gives them the skills to implement those wacky ideas that become Minecraft and Portal.
I also love a bit of structured chaos and meeting new people and being a mentor, all of which I am finding at VFS. I have thought for a long time that I'd love to teach, too, so I am considering becoming a TA. Teacher's Assistants at VFS help teach, answer student questions, mark assignments, help with events, and do a number of other tasks as required. I think I'd be a good fit, and that it would be a good fit for me. The work/life balance I am seeing there is appealing, and I believe I would feel valued there. I will be able to bring my communications degree, five years as a professional writer, editor, and manager, and my game design diploma (and all the ancillary skills and experience) to the position.
Anyway, just thoughts for now. I need to set up some meetings with current TAs and speak to the program head to see if it would be as rosy as I think, but from here the view is just fine.
As a side note, James Portnow of Extra Credits is coming to VFS Game Design to chat with us about narrative in games this coming week, and VFS has asked me to write a short article about the talk. I'll link to that article later this week.
Thanks for stopping by.
Sunday 29 January 2012
Sunday 22 January 2012
Magic Bullets
We, as a school, were very fortunate this past week and weekend to host representatives from some of my favorite developers. VFS hosts a weekend-long Game Design Expo and Open House annually, and it's always humbling and a little scary to meet people who you want to work for. With the games industry being, apparently, a tightly knit organization where everyone knows everyone else, you want to make a good impression or at least avoid making a poor one.
The presentations and Q+A sessions I witnessed Friday and Saturday were mostly pretty encouraging, with the mantra of "be awesome, be humble, be passionate, and prove it" being just as relevant now as it was ten years ago when I first applied for a Contract Writer position at BioWare Edmonton. As a side note, I may not have been anything but passionate back then, and I certainly couldn't prove the rest at the time.
Anyway, I was especially pleased to hear designers from BioWare Austin, Bethesda, and Eidos Montreal tell packed audiences how important good interactive narrative and project management—my disciplines—are to the success of their triple-A titles.
With so many hopeful students in the crowd it should be no surprise that the Q+A sessions often start off with a chorus of "what are you looking for in a candidate for position X, Y, or Z?" The short answer is always the same—be awesome, be humble, be passionate, and prove it. Sounds pretty simple, but being the best at something, or nearly so, and proving it to your prospective employer while putting your most gregarious and professional self forward and while fighting down the nervousness and worry—well, it's a lot to take on at once. Landing that great job is a long process, a lot like writing a good novel or a television script. After years of writing and editing, I know how to recognize immediately what not to do and I understand the theories of what to do well, but having the discipline to develop a good story while avoiding those traps, clichés, and bad days is a serious undertaking.
As a writer or a job applicant you are trying to connect with other people. A lot can go wrong. Your characters might be boring or hard to identify with. Their actions might be incongruous with their personalities. You might ramble on and lose your point. Your story might fizzle out during the second act. You might introduce an unwelcome and seemingly random solution to a problem that your audience doesn't get. You are almost always going to be too close to your work, and you might not realize it and let it show. Worst of all, the targets are always moving since you are dealing with people and not computer programs.
A misstep anywhere might sink your chances for success, and all you can do is recognize the pitfalls and work to avoid them while making yourself stand out. This is a long-view process. There are no certainties, and there are no magic bullets. I wish there were. Be awesome. Be humble. Be passionate. Prove it. I know, I know—I'm preaching like a self-help book, and those who know me also know that I don't always maintain the high standards I set out in writing. I always try to.
This attitude of being excellent and positive in all things, though, is always on my mind. Every day I go to school and shake my head when I see people cutting corners or having a "good enough" attitude. As I mentioned in my last post, my group formed a bit earlier than recommended, but it wasn't an accident. I recognized a group of people who have the skills and the attitude to do good work. In short, we hired each other because we saw each other displaying the qualities we wanted in team members over the course of four months.
The funny thing? It would be arguable to say that any one of us is the "best" at our chosen disciplines. What we are is ready to set our egos aside, form a vision, work hard, and make an amazing unified portfolio piece that you will be able to play six months from now.
Let me make one final point before signing off today.
I recognized a pattern from speaking to game industry veterans over the past few years. These 40- and 50-somethings joined the industry back when it was much younger, and their career-launching stories are often so removed from today's reality that they are hardly relevant (but still fun to hear). They usually start with "it was a crazy/random/happenstance event that go me my first job." Dave Warfield, the head of the GD program at VFS, was hired out of Radio Shack into QA at what would become Distinctive Software, Vancouver's first game developer. He was the entire QA department at the time, and he had no experience beyond playing a lot of games. Bruce Nesmith, Bethesda's Director of Design, had a similar story.
The game industry has matured into big business since these men were originally hired and hundreds of eager students like myself are graduating from game design programs all over the world. Competition is everywhere, and relying on a crazy random happenstance—relying on magic bullets—will get you nowhere today.
Though I'd take one if I could. ;)
Thanks for stopping by.
The presentations and Q+A sessions I witnessed Friday and Saturday were mostly pretty encouraging, with the mantra of "be awesome, be humble, be passionate, and prove it" being just as relevant now as it was ten years ago when I first applied for a Contract Writer position at BioWare Edmonton. As a side note, I may not have been anything but passionate back then, and I certainly couldn't prove the rest at the time.
Anyway, I was especially pleased to hear designers from BioWare Austin, Bethesda, and Eidos Montreal tell packed audiences how important good interactive narrative and project management—my disciplines—are to the success of their triple-A titles.
With so many hopeful students in the crowd it should be no surprise that the Q+A sessions often start off with a chorus of "what are you looking for in a candidate for position X, Y, or Z?" The short answer is always the same—be awesome, be humble, be passionate, and prove it. Sounds pretty simple, but being the best at something, or nearly so, and proving it to your prospective employer while putting your most gregarious and professional self forward and while fighting down the nervousness and worry—well, it's a lot to take on at once. Landing that great job is a long process, a lot like writing a good novel or a television script. After years of writing and editing, I know how to recognize immediately what not to do and I understand the theories of what to do well, but having the discipline to develop a good story while avoiding those traps, clichés, and bad days is a serious undertaking.
As a writer or a job applicant you are trying to connect with other people. A lot can go wrong. Your characters might be boring or hard to identify with. Their actions might be incongruous with their personalities. You might ramble on and lose your point. Your story might fizzle out during the second act. You might introduce an unwelcome and seemingly random solution to a problem that your audience doesn't get. You are almost always going to be too close to your work, and you might not realize it and let it show. Worst of all, the targets are always moving since you are dealing with people and not computer programs.
A misstep anywhere might sink your chances for success, and all you can do is recognize the pitfalls and work to avoid them while making yourself stand out. This is a long-view process. There are no certainties, and there are no magic bullets. I wish there were. Be awesome. Be humble. Be passionate. Prove it. I know, I know—I'm preaching like a self-help book, and those who know me also know that I don't always maintain the high standards I set out in writing. I always try to.
This attitude of being excellent and positive in all things, though, is always on my mind. Every day I go to school and shake my head when I see people cutting corners or having a "good enough" attitude. As I mentioned in my last post, my group formed a bit earlier than recommended, but it wasn't an accident. I recognized a group of people who have the skills and the attitude to do good work. In short, we hired each other because we saw each other displaying the qualities we wanted in team members over the course of four months.
The funny thing? It would be arguable to say that any one of us is the "best" at our chosen disciplines. What we are is ready to set our egos aside, form a vision, work hard, and make an amazing unified portfolio piece that you will be able to play six months from now.
Let me make one final point before signing off today.
I recognized a pattern from speaking to game industry veterans over the past few years. These 40- and 50-somethings joined the industry back when it was much younger, and their career-launching stories are often so removed from today's reality that they are hardly relevant (but still fun to hear). They usually start with "it was a crazy/random/happenstance event that go me my first job." Dave Warfield, the head of the GD program at VFS, was hired out of Radio Shack into QA at what would become Distinctive Software, Vancouver's first game developer. He was the entire QA department at the time, and he had no experience beyond playing a lot of games. Bruce Nesmith, Bethesda's Director of Design, had a similar story.
The game industry has matured into big business since these men were originally hired and hundreds of eager students like myself are graduating from game design programs all over the world. Competition is everywhere, and relying on a crazy random happenstance—relying on magic bullets—will get you nowhere today.
Though I'd take one if I could. ;)
Thanks for stopping by.
Wednesday 18 January 2012
Being Proactive is not Always Good
The polite word for me is "driven". I like to meet challenges head on and make ambitious goals for myself, and I bring that attitude to most everything I do. I'm not sure if it's always welcome when it comes to group work, but for the most part it means I stay on top of things and have a leg up early on. It can also get me into a bit of occasional trouble—a side effect of all of this hard work is that I tend to jump to conclusions and into action early, too.
For example, I learned last January (8 months before I would start classes) that each GD class has at least one class rep, so I immediately made it my goal to be that guy. I got some funny looks from the staff here on day one when I asked about it, but we had a vote a while later and you know the rest. Win!
We needed to form flash teams for Term 2, and we could have let them work themselves naturally, but the other GD23 class rep and I chose to build them ourselves right after hearing the news. When our instructors asked for a list of our programmers to form our teams around, we handed them a list of fully-formed teams instead. Win!
After working with my flash team and having had many experiences working with others, I've formed a lot of opinions about my fellow class members. So with pre-production on our final project (and future career prospects) just around the corner, I decided to form my final project team a little early. Just before Christmas holidays we announced to our class that four of us were working together, and another group of five also stepped forward. A third of our class was suddenly in teams. Can you guess the reaction from the rest of the class? Lose!
Some people were mad. Most people were surprised. Worst of all, some people were panicked, maybe feeling they were being left behind and feeling they also should form teams. None of this was intentional, of course, and we were aware that we might cause a panic, but the alternative was for us to lie for several months. Not really an alternative at all.
In speaking with various instructors about this, it seems like we did what we needed to, but on the other hand we've also been told that we should maybe have waited before jumping into teams, and that we could expect our current group composition to change. I don't believe that will happen—I wouldn't have shacked up with my team if I wasn't sure I could rely on them to build an excellent portfolio piece—but I *am* open to the possibility that we could have disagreements or other problems as we go along, and as a four-man team there could be room for one more of the right people.
But that's a group decision.
Anyway, realizing that I'm new to the game and being eager to soak up as much experience as possible, I'm taking every opportunity I can to challenge my assumptions about everyone in the class, which is the advice we were given by one of my favourite instructors. The short version of this post is that I'm aware of my limitations and negative tendencies and taking steps to mitigate them.
I'll post about our team soon. We're working on our group identity right now and I am excited to see what our artist is going to come up with for our splash page.
Thanks for stopping by.
Tuesday 17 January 2012
Interactive Narrative Homework
Yes, I know I'm WAY behind with my posts, but today will not be changing that. The following youtube videos are all going to be used in an upcoming presentation in my Interactive Narrative class. I'm sure some of you will be very familiar with the videos, and maybe we'll discuss them sometime in the future.
For now, enjoy some of the key moments of Final Fantasy III, what I feel is by far the best game in the series.
Assault on Narshe
1:19–2:35
Cyan's Loss
0:45–2:00
The Opera Scene
0:00–4:02
Welcome to the World of Ruin
0:40–2:35
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