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.