The game industry is a truly amazing industry to work in. It attracts people who are creative, passionate, brilliant and determined. It is a primary driver of technological invention and innovation. It is in a constant state of flux – surfing on a perpetually cresting wave of change, the industry itself is at its best and most interesting when it is just about to bail, at that perfect instant where all of its balance and energy and momentum and daring are put to the test.
The game companies that comprise the industry – at least those whose inner workings I have had the pleasure of glimpsing – are full of energy and excitement. Games themselves are fascinating magic boxes, and it is no surprise to me that the factories responsible for stuffing that magic in are such wonderful places to be. I am not known for being a ‘happy’ person, but everything seems to look brighter to me when I’m walking the halls of a game company.
And this is to say nothing of developers. Game developers are among the smartest, most creative and toughest sorts of folk I have ever met. They are not only willing and able to tackle almost any challenge put before them, but they often go out of their way to find new challenges to undertake. Game developers hate to back down from a challenge to seek more predictable, better understood solutions – instead, they prefer to invent their way through problems and get to the other side.
The game industry is still a new frontier in many different senses. From a creative perspective, the very basis of what we do remains poorly understood and driven by inquisitive experimentation. Every day we confront new creative challenges as we try to understand how our work speaks to our audience, and which mechanisms make our games meaningful to players.
From an engineering perspective, we continue to hurtle forward at the speed of Moore’s Law, wielding algorithms at runtime today that could not have executed in a decade on the machines our industry was founded on. More amazing is that, in many cases, the guys writing today’s algorithms got their start on those original machines.
From a business perspective, we are also at the cutting edge. We are trying to figure out how our entirely digital medium fits into an economy that evolved to support physical goods. We need to challenge the establishment, drive change, and invent new ways of distributing product in exchange for money – or even potentially go beyond that and question more fundamental notions of how economies function, and what goods, services, property and exchange even mean.
Even more amazing is that many of the people who work in this industry are well-versed in more than one of these disciplines. Say what you want about game industry executives being cynical bloodsuckers who would cut their own developers’ throats for their shareholders, but before you do, stand them up beside a pharmaceutical industry executive, or an energy industry executive. These dirtbags will knowingly poison entire generations, or recklessly overexploit resources while decimating entire regions – and then steal from their shareholders in the process! Those game industry execs that you might be condemning don’t look so bad all of a sudden, do they? Now add to that the fact that they not only push forward on some very fundamental problems in business, but they can also run down a flag carrier in capture the flag and then give feedback on the tuning of a shotgun.
Engineers in game development, for the most part, tend to have a pretty good design sense as well. They are the ones who touch the code, and they often have a pretty good sense of what works and what doesn’t, and of what will work and what won’t. The cliché of the programmer as an awkward, introverted nerd who can’t communicate effectively just does not gel with my day-to-day experience of working with them. They are as smart and as design savvy as many designers, and the best of them are multidisciplinary coder-designer geniuses (many of whom are now proving the case for indie development).
And, on top of all of that, for the most part, the game industry is meritocratic. People who do good work, who are good to work with and who make a difference, tend to do well. Yes, sometimes good, smart, talented people draw the short straw, but this is the result of bad luck in a high-risk environment, and not typically the result of unfairness.
So, for all of these reasons and more, I love working in the game industry. And, now that the hugs and kisses are out of the way, the rest of the columns in this series are going to be about what I don’t like.
Clint Hocking is a creative director at LucasArts working on an unannounced project. He blogs at www.clicknothing.com. Read and follow Clint's other columns on his topic page.