The reality of the games industry

What it’s really like to make stuff up for a living.
Since we started the atomic.edu section, we’ve covered a wide variety of institutes and courses. We’ve looked at many different fields of employment, ranging from games development to high tech storage. This month we’re again focusing on games development, although our mandate is somewhat different to usual – we’re keen to address some of the misconceptions prospective employees of the industry may have. To, put simply, provide a bit of a reality check.
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Studies
Last month, we looked at the offerings of two private institutes that run games development courses. As we discovered, both the Academy of Interactive Entertainment and QANTM offer a good selection of courses. With campuses of one or both institutes located in the capitals of all the eastern states bar Tasmania, attending either of these two world class institutes is more of a realistic proposition for more budding games developers than it was even a couple of years ago. The games development courses that are available and the institutes that are running them have matured significantly in recent years. Course providers work closely with local developers to ensure their material is relevant and that their graduates enter the workforce equipped with the skills necessary in a creative industry that is highly lucrative and high in pressure.

Despite the industry’s involvement with shaping the curriculum of these courses, despite the increasing availability of games development courses, despite this section bearing the name ‘atomic.edu’, you would be mistaken to assume that a prospective employer’s qualifications are all the human resources manager at a games studio pays attention to. Pieces of paper, though they may bear the mark of top notch private institutes or Group of Eight universities, aren’t the be all and end all in the games industry.

Kevin McIntosh from Torus Games says, "The courses typically provide the right skills that an applicant needs for a role in the industry. If the new employee has the right foundation, they’ll find it easier to learn our internal packages quickly. However, we have hired self-motivated staff that have learned [what they need to know] from books and websites – it shows dedication to their career and we love that."

His point – that courses are primarily there to provide a foundation of knowledge – is one echoed throughout the industry. David Giles, Chief Operating Officer at Tantalus Media in Melbourne, says, "[The courses] are important as this is where a large number of our new staff will come from. The value of these institutions for us is how quickly the new hire is able to come up to speed and fit comfortably into the work place."

And it’s true. With more courses on offer in more institutes in more states, more people are doing courses – whether it’s at their local TAFE, through a university or in a private institute like the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. It makes sense that the bulk of hires in the games industry will be graduates of the many certificates, diplomas, advanced diplomas and bachelor degrees now available. But not all of the hires will have such a background. The industry still takes on the self-taught, as Kevin McIntosh observed. You may have learned C++ from a tome at home, but your knowledge is still valuable. Just remember – it’s not enough to simply say that you know xyz. Your knowledge must be demonstrated in a tangible way.

As both David Giles and Kevin McIntosh said, the most important part of these courses is that they provide a good foundation which individual developers can build upon as they impart their own lessons to new employees. Australian developers work on a wide variety of projects on a wide variety of platforms – they obviously don’t all require the same skills and attributes from their employees. At the same time, having a solid foundation of the core skills required of everyone in the industry is important. The games industry is deadline driven. A studio can be a nurturing environment, but ultimately you’re not going to get hired if you need to be guided by the hand from step one. Having a solid foundation of knowledge means you can easily slip into any development environment – be it Firemint or Epic – and quickly get your head around how it operates. To put it in coding terms, once you get your head around the theory behind programming – the part that’s common to all languages – you’ll be able to easily move between different languages, even if their syntaxes and APIs differ considerably.

Work
Kevin McIntosh feels that prospective employees are often ignorant of how serious the games industry really is. He says, "It’s a real business and a real production, just like creating movies and television shows. There are hours of brainstorming, grunt work, testing and iteration that go into making the game."

Just think about how long some of your favourite titles have taken to come out after the initial announcement of their existence. The processes involved in designing a game, laying the foundations for it and then building it up component by component – the graphics, the audio, the programming – all of that takes a lot of time and the involvement of a lot of people. And all along you have non-technical people, such as those in marketing and public relations, involved. Developing games isn’t all fun and games – a point echoed by David Giles. "Most [prospective employees] tend to think it will be back-to-back gameplay fun," he says. "There’s quite a bit of that, but not as much as they probably thought."

Being a deadline-driven industry, those in the games industry can work ridiculous hours. They can suffer enormous stress. The end result of all this labour is a work of entertainment, sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the process involved in creating that work of entertainment is always a barrel of laughs for those behind the scenes.

And that, in a roundabout way, brings us to another important point. "Some new employees might think they are coming in to work on the next best-selling first person shooter," says Kevin McIntosh. "Often that’s not the case and most employees need to work on games they might not play themselves."

This is very true. Consider Tantalus’ catalogue – mostly a string of tie-ins for DS, with maybe a couple of PSP and N-Gage titles. Last year they did the Nintendo DS game Pony Friends. It was published by Eidos and the background image of the official page is a lovely shade of pink. With flowers. And cute pony pictures. Probably not what every Tantalus employee plays on the weekend, but it was a job. Just as there are gamers who finished Crysis and then sat around waiting for the next big genre title, there are gamers – little ones with pigtails – who want to play games like Pony Friends. There’s money to be made from those gamers or, more accurately, their parents. Someone needs to cater to that market’s demands.

Often, when speaking of the Australian games industry, writers will mention titles like Destroy All Humans!, Powerslide and Dark Reign, but the reality is most developers here work on tie-ins to popular films and television programs and ports from one platform to another. The Xbox version of Unreal 2 was developed here. We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Or that working on Pony Friends would’ve sucked. But those looking to get into the industry need to realise that, realistically, they’re not going to be working on Far Cry 3 or Grand Theft Auto 5. Even if they move abroad – entering job markets with far more competition, mind you – the studios that consistently develop such titles account for a relatively small chunk of the industry.

Attributes
As mentioned earlier, the qualities an employer is most concerned with aren’t necessarily your qualifications. Certainly qualifications play a role in the selection of employees, but there are other, vitally important attributes they look out for. Attributes that aren’t taught at any university or private institute.

Whether seeking a job as a programmer or an artist, the prospective employee needs to demonstrate that they’re creative. After all, the games development industry is a creative one. One of the best ways to demonstrate this is through having a playable demo to go with your job application. Demos are very important in this industry. Having spent your own time creating something shows dedication and enthusiasm – important qualities in this industry.

Furthermore, it shows not only the ability to finish a task, but also the ability to find a happy medium between attaining perfection and actually finishing a project in a reasonable timeframe. Demos need not be complex – a simple puzzle game can be enough – but they need to display your talents in your chosen field. If you’re seeking employment as an artist, obviously your game should look good. Mods and independently-developed titles can look nice on a resume, but unfortunately with collaborative projects – unless you’re a lone programmer teaming with a single artist – it can be difficult for developers to figure out the exact nature of your personal contribution. Don’t underestimate the importance of the demo as, ultimately, experience is more important than qualifications. Designing and completing a project as a self-motivated as opposed to a graded exercise not only displays what a studio would consider good character, but would be a valuable learning experience.

Important, too, is the ability to think critically and analytically about one’s own work and about the work of others. It’s not a love of playing games that makes one suited to working in the business of creating them. Rather, it’s the ability and the desire to analyse them – to figure out how they work, to understand what they successfully do and what they fail to do – that makes for a skilled games developer.

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BY Chris Taylor
Source：atomic

This article appeared in the December, 2008 issue of Atomic.

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