1. I used it to complete a non-trivial project
2. I spent the majority of my day in it for over a year

#1 Means I have to have actually gotten into the guts of it and made it work for me. For example, while I had toyed with Python several times while in grad school, it wasn’t until I integrated it into Angel that that I could really say I knew it, thus it gets a date of 2008.

#2 allows me to include languages I learned for games that haven’t shipped. :-)

• 1998: TI-BASIC
• 1999: Visual Basic
• 2000: AppleScript
• 2001: C and C++
• 2002: x86 Assembly
• 2003: Objective-C and PHP
• 2004: Cg
• 2005: ActionScript, Java, JavaScript, and C#
• 2006: Unreal Kismet (yeah, I’ll call it a programming language)
• 2007: Ruby
• 2008: Python
• 2009: Whatever we call the game scripting language we use at Bethesda

So now the question is… what should I learn this year? Everything else has been inspired by a project (either personal or professional), and I don’t have anything on the horizon that would necessitate learning something new.

So I ask you, internet, what is worth learning? What new paradigm should I consider? What will expand my mind and my programming chops?

It had to be something:

• broad enough to appeal to digital humanities scholars who may not necessarily follow games
• engaging enough to interest people who do follow games and would likely end up coming to the talk because they saw “game designer” on the poster
• unrelated enough to my work at Bethesda that I could talk about it without tipping our hand as to our current project

In the end I decided to talk about procedural content, its current place in game development, and where it might be going in the future. I could try to sum it up, but here’s a video of my slides set over the audio from the talk.

My own feedback:

• I still talk way too fast.
• When speaking off-the-cuff, I have a tendency to preface too many statements with “I mean.” I should to work on that.
• The “character choices” segment is still pretty hazy and doesn’t make its case very well.
• My final conclusion could benefit some from more concrete examples, even if they have to be hypothetical.
• I need to do better keeping up with the blogosphere, even when spending all my free time prepping a presentation, since I only found out after the presentation that Clint Hocking has been making most of my final points, in a characteristically far more thoughtful and articulate way as part of his Click Nothing Tour ’09. Ah well.

BIG THANKS to:

• Joe Gilbert and Bethany Nowviskie from the Scholars’ Lab for inviting me.
• Liz Bernard for making an example animation for me.
• Jesse Schell, who first introduced me to the Innovator’s Dilemma.
• Joel Burgess and Ben Cummings, who served as invaluable sounding boards and test audiences. If you didn’t like it in its current state, you would have hated it before these guys were able to tell me all the problems it had. :-)

This past weekend my friend Benji and I made the long trek from the Capital Wasteland up to Boston for a new-ish un-conference called GameLoop. Apart from seriously misunderestimating the amount of traffic that would slow us down, the trip itself was uneventful. I did score a gold medal in the “going through a toll booth without having to come to stop” game, though, which was a great moment of victory.

As for the event itself — it was terribly cool. Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan made the thing happen by sheer force of will, and I heartily applaud them for it. They more than doubled the attendance from last year, and based on what I saw, I imagine it will continue to grow for some time to come.

GameLoop is essentially a games-specific version of BarCamp — if that doesn’t mean anything to you, just know that it’s a sort of ad-hoc organized-as-you-go conference. The day starts with about an hour of people standing at a whiteboard saying “I’d like to do a session on X” or “can we get a roundtable to talk about Y?” Then you just do it. The second spiritual element of an un-conference is that if you’re sitting in a session and you feel you’re not getting anything out of it, you vote with your feet and head to something else; nobody gets offended, everybody learns.

Due to the inherent mutex lock on me, I could only go to one session in each timeslot, and in some cases the choices were hard.

Session 1: Designer/Player Trust-Building

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this session — I felt like we were discussing good game design principles, but couldn’t necessarily see how they were specifically related to trust. You want to have understandable level designs, make sure your player understands their goals, etc. Maybe the point was that trust is so endemic to game design that the two can’t be separated. I felt like mid-way through we ended up just naming examples of games that made us trust the designers (I was guilty of this as well, contributing Donkey Kong Country), and, as was pointed out by one of my colleagues later that evening, it’s not the most productive form of discourse.

Session 2: Prototyping

I had given a talk on Prototyping back when I worked at EA, had originally considered dusting it off (and removing EA-specific portions), but just didn’t have time to get it together. Darius sneakily (and a bit cheekily :-) ) put it up on the board anyway, and it received enough support that we pretty much had to do it. So I pushed it towards a round-table format as much as I could.

This was a really productive session, at least for me. It made me feel better to hear that everyone seems to have the trouble of execs/producers mistaking prototypes for shipping code, and we talked about strategies for mitigating that. We stopped short of saying actively sabotage your code, but writing it in a different language from the shipping game was one of the cuter strategies.

I think my slightly controversial view that prototypes are science experiments and should only answer single questions did exactly what it should do — spark discussion as some people agreed with me and others disagreed. Most people in the session were contributing, and it felt like everyone was learning, so I felt like this was a win.

I walked away thinking it would be fun to de-EA-ize my old prototyping talk and do it at events like these. At least a 10 minute version to help frame give-and-take like we had here.

(I also met Darren Torpey for the first time — he worked porting Angel to XNA, so it was cool to finally shake hands with one of the folks with whom I communicate semi-frequently.)

LUNCH

Very tasty sandwiches. Very large cookies. Above average coffee.

Session 3: “Programmer Designer” vs. “Designer Programmer” + Game Design Basics

Early on in my career I had to make the call as to whether I would be a programmer with design skills or a designer with programming skills. I went the design route and have been pretty happy with it, and this discussion was exploring that boundary and how people on either side of it felt.

I definitely think as games become more systemic that this line is going to get blurrier, if never dissolve completely. It’s also been my experience that it’s far easier for designers to get input on programming issues than for programmers to get input on design issues, though that’s largely an individual studio culture thing and case-by-case. One engineer said that he felt he couldn’t make any change to a system without getting clearance from a designer, and that the process was more of a handoff than a collaboration. That made me sad, but from what I heard, it’s pretty much the general state of the industry.

I’m not sure where the talk went after that, because I decided to bounce and go into the “Game Design Basics” talk and share my vast reams of knowledge. :-) For the most part it was a “how to break into design” roundtable, which always interests me, as you might remember, dear reader.

Session 4: Procedural Story & Emergent Narrative

Another roundtable type thing that I was attempting to run. I felt really bad about this one because I think I did crappy job with it — it’s obviously an overly broad topic and there are lots of quagmires hiding in there waiting to drag a discussion down for hours. I warned that I was going to shut down lines of conversation if I thought they were going in that direction, but then defined the problem so loosely that the rest of the session was spent trying to better define it, which was the chief quagmire I was wanting to avoid.

<sigh>

I could tell there were some equally frustrated people wanting to get it back on track, but it’s hard to control a passionate crowd who wants to talk definitions. This is definitely a situation where a 10-minute prepared opening could have really helped.

Session 5: Meaning in Games & Interactive Metaphor

On the long drive up, somewhere, I think, in Delaware, Benji and I got talking about Passage, which I described as the best, possibly only example I could give of “interactive metaphor,” something where the mechanics themselves are metaphorical. It inspired Benji to run this roundtable, the last of the day, to get people talking around this issue. There was some confusion over exactly what was being discussed, but to be fair, this is a complex and hard to grasp issue. A lot of people latched onto the moral choices of Fallout and Bioshock, but I think we all at least walked away willing to acknowledge that some more subtlety in those choices would be more interesting.

Of course, moral choices are not necessarily interactive metaphor. Perhaps the fact that we couldn’t come up with any other examples means that this is still an area ripe for development.

Post-Conference Shenanigans

Afterwards, most people headed over to a local watering hole for some refreshment. Sat down with Scott and spent a lot of time talking about his game Heritage, which I’m really excited to actually see in action when finished. Also met (or re-met possibly) Marc ten Bosch, talked about indie games, multi-dimensional thought, and the pros and cons of EA. At least I think we did. The beer at that place was good.

Ended the evening at the office of Orbus Gameworks, playing my first round of Race to the Galaxy, which I found delightful, if a bit non-orthogonal for my tastes. I think more mastery of it might reveal systems I didn’t see before. We schemed about ways to make next year’s GameLoop even better. Which I guess means that I have to go back next year. :-)

On the drive back Benji and I debated the merits of doing a DC area GameLoop (Capital GameLoop?) — there’s not much of a scene in the area, but maybe a smaller event could snowball and eventually draw in folks from North Carolina and Philly. Anything is possible; it would definitely be good to see more game development community in the area.

As I find more interesting metrics, I plan to post them, as well as update this post. But hopefully the 10 games themselves will remain static, unless there’s some moment of “HOW ON EARTH COULD I FORGET TO INCLUDE CATWOMAN?!”

Unordered 10 Impactful Games

• Rez
• Sly 2: Band of Thieves
• Portal
• Braid
• Marathon
• Super Mario World
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• Civilization
• Final Fantasy VI
• Planetfall

These are the games that, over my life, I played the hell out of. Ones that I was obsessed with. Ones that impressed me to my core. That haunted my dreams when I wasn’t playing them. Ones that I will evangelize to people who haven’t played them.

There are many other games I loved, enjoyed immensely, and replay from time to time. But in the interests of keeping the list to 10, I just went with the ones that had a profound impact or rose to the level of obsession for me.

Note that I’ve limited this list to video and computer games, or else I would have to include Dungeons & Dragons, Diplomacy, and several others.

(Not meant to be a “top 10” of any sort or a declaration of industry impact or anything.)

Metacritic

• 93: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• 93: Braid
• 92: Super Mario World
• 92: Final Fantasy VI
• 91: Rez
• 90: Portal
• 88: Sly 2: Band of Thieves

In places where a game had more than one rating due to remakes or multiple platform releases, I went with the highest rating. Marathon, Civilization, and Planetfall have no Metacritic rankings. The Super Mario World and Final Fantasy VI rankings come from the GameBoy Advance re-releases.

This yields an average Metacritic ranking of 91.2, which would seem to indicate that the games which mattered most to me are also games that the industry as a whole (or at least the press) also consider to be paragons.

Chronologically Sorted

• 1983: Planetfall
• 1990: Super Mario World
• 1991: Civilization
• 1994: Final Fantasy VI
• 1994: Marathon
• 1997: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• 2001: Rez
• 2004: Sly 2: Band of Thieves
• 2007: Portal
• 2008: Braid

At first I was troubled that there was too much clustering in recent years, but this has an average of 2.8 years between games. If you throw out the first 7-year gap, that drops to 2.25. I would be comfortable with either number.

Genres and Demographics

• Rez: music-based rail shooter
• Sly 2: Band of Thieves: adventure platformer
• Portal: first-person puzzler
• Braid: puzzle platformer
• Marathon: first-person shooter
• Super Mario World: action platformer
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: action exploration RPG
• Civilization: strategy simulation
• Final Fantasy VI: RPG
• Planetfall: text adventure

So breaking that down:

• 3 games that could be classified as platformers
• 2 first-person games
• 7 games with strong story elements
• 4 games where the story is absolutely endemic to the game’s quality
• 2 shooters (and one had very strong story)
• 5 games with gameplay focused around puzzles
• 3 games with majority gameplay focused around puzzles
• 4 games made by Japanese developers
• 6 games made by American developers
• 0 games made by anyone else
• 2 games that lose a substantial amount of (if not all) impact after first play-through
• 1 game that is meant to be played through multiple times for most enjoyment
• 3 games that expose fairly complex numerical models to the player
• 4 games that are continuing titles in a series
• 3 games that kicked off a series
• 1 game that is rumored to be the start of a series
• 2 games that stand alone
• 4 PC/Mac games
• 6 console games
  • 1 Dreamcast game (I played on PS2 originally)
  • 1 PlayStation 2 game
  • 1 Xbox 360 game
  • 2 Super Nintendo games
  • 1 PlayStation game

I first visited New Orleans when I was a kid. I don’t much remember the details of that trip, but I came away with a mild-to-moderate distaste for the place. But I figured it had been well over a decade since then, so I decided to give it another chance on my recent trip across the country.

Man am I glad I did. Stayed in a little spot in the French Quarter, wandered the lonely streets, and had the best food and drink of my entire trip.

My lord, the food. So good it deserves its own paragraph. And those folks know how to make a Bloody Mary.

But I digress.

As I wandered the streets, I started thinking about how it might fare as a gamespace. At several levels, New Orleans would make a fantastic setting for an open world RPG. Very few tall buildings (fewer interiors to develop), a party district, narrow alleyways with character, wide boulevards, music floating in from far away, docks, travelers from all over, foreign languages, multiple religions, etc. It would be even better if you jumped back 150 years or so to, say, the period just before the Civil War. Then you’d have a wide countryside to explore, could play up voodoo magic, have guns that were fun to play with but not semi-automatic, various backwater settlements.

As I walked back to my hotel from dinner, I thought about it more. There’s such potential to make a compelling game! Why have there been so few games set in New Orleans? As a matter of fact, why hasn’t the Old South been used in an open world setting?

And then I remembered — oh right. Slavery. Something no reasonable game developer wants to touch with a 39-and-a-half foot pole. Rightly so. It’s an incredibly dicey topic that would be near-impossible to present in a sensitive manner while giving the player freedom.

You could, of course, let the player free slaves, join the Underground Railroad, maybe even start as a slave themselves. But if you care about player choice, you’d also want to give them the ability to suppress the slaves, capture escapees, etc.

Oh, man. The headlines would be horrible. How would the forum moderators even begin to know what was appropriate? You think games get negative attention for violence…

And one of the arguments that would inevitably brought up from the enthusiast press is that slavery has been dealt with in games before, and this should be no different. You have a choice to enslave people or free the slaves in Fallout 3; Civilization makes it into a mechanic with tradeoffs as you build your cities.

But of course, this is different. There is a substantial, fundamental difference interacting with completely fictionalized slavery and interacting with a recreation of very real historical oppression.

It’s kind of unfortunate that this is sort of an untouchable area for games, because I think there’s tremendous power to educate people about the time period and those attitudes, beyond what you can learn from reading or watching movies with similar settings and themes.

I chose to free the slaves in Fallout 3 (I seem to always play goodie-two-shoes as much as games will support it), but I’d be interested to hear from people who took a more evil track. Do you think you would feel any differently about your actions if you had been tracking down runaway African-American slaves in 1850’s Louisiana than you did in the 2277 Capital Wasteland? Would it make you question your actions more? Would you be able to turn off the bad behavior detector in your conscience the same way I do every time I kill hundreds of people over a lunchtime session of Team Fortress 2?

I don’t have any answers to these questions. I don’t think there are. Maybe someone reading this will have some answers, or at least more articulate questions.

But as for getting that first break, I was recently pointed to an article by Steve Gaynor on getting in to the industry with no experience. Every designer I’ve met has a different story on how they got their first break, but many are a variation on his. He has some really good advice about the right attitudes and work ethics to get you started.

After this, I go back to talking about games themselves. F’reals.

I have a lot of fun going to parties where I get to meet new people. Part of this is because I genuinely enjoy hearing about people’s lives, though I often express this interest with an unfortunately glib “so what’s your story?” Moreover, its really fun when the the topic comes around to what people do for a living because I get to smile and say “I design video games.” This elicits one of several responses.

• Guy who doesn’t give a shit about video games:

Oh. I teach poetry.

• Girl who doesn’t give a shit about video games:

My boyfriend plays Call of Duty a lot. Did you make that?

• Girl who doesn’t give a shit about video games, but is kind of wanting to keep talking to me:

Oh yeah? I really like the Wii! And that guitar game!

• Guy who likes video games:

Dude, that’s sweet! How’d you get that gig?

• Girl who likes video games:

[See above.]

• Game Programmer:

Man, I want to be a designer. How did you get to be one?

• Other Game Programmer:

You design folks are fruitcakes.

• Game Designer:

Oh, nice. Where do you work?

The point is that outside the industry, “Game Developer” is seen as a sexy job, and inside the industry, “Game Designer” is seen as a sexy role. This is not universally true; most artists/programmers/producers are very happy doing what they do. But there is a strong segment that wants to do design and feels like it’s the secret cabal. It’s also a frustrating secret cabal because oftentimes designers seem to have no tangible skills that differentiate them from other developers (or often seem defined by a lack of tangible skills, i.e.: “can’t code; can’t draw; must be a designer”).

Since I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, the question I get a lot (especially from industry friends) is “what the heck do they ask you at a design interview?” Since “design” covers all manner of tasks, it’s hard to imagine how a company can suss out your abilities in an interview. So I wanted to do a writeup on my experiences with design interviews at several different studios over the past few months. I’m not an authority in this situation, so you don’t have to take my word for it. This is just a kind of “what happens at design interviews, how I got them, how I prepped for them.” This is also based on my experiences interviewing people for positions at EA, so there’s some of both sides here. (I’ve avoided mentioning specifics of actual companies or people, but all the stories are true.)

Step One: Get the Interview

In most cases, this is the hardest part. Again, because design is so amorphous, it’s hard to distill your qualifications into a resume. Especially if you’re just starting out and only have small personal design projects to talk about. (Of course Step Zero is doing those small personal design projects; like the book says, to be a designer you just have to say “I am a game designer,” and then make some games. No excuse.)

Obviously the best way to actually get an interview is to know somebody working at that company. It’s unfortunate when you’re trying to break in, but that’s the industry. I once read (no source, sorry) that something like 90% of positions in games are filled without ever being advertised. So really you’re much better off going to an IGDA meeting than scanning monster.com. Knowing people is good; that’s why smart people like Darius write entire series on networking in the games industry.

Whether a contact can help you is a function of two things: how well they know you and how high up they are in the organization. (If you want to do design, it also helps tremendously if they, too, are designers.) Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother befriending lower people on the totem pole, for two reasons: (1) the real reason, that friendship and fellowship are good things in and of themselves, and (2) the more mercenary reason, that today’s junior designer is tomorrow’s project lead. But it does mean that you need to calibrate your expectations of what a contact can do for you. A junior artist who knows you very well is less likely to get you an interview slot than a creative director who remembers you from a conference. (Of course, after the interview they’ll go ask that junior artist what it was like to work with you, so still be nice to them. :-) )

Interview Prep

There are some things you should do before the interview. They seem obvious, but it’s amazing how some people don’t do them.

1. Research the company. Don’t ask them where they’re located, what kinds of games they make, what their last titles were. You should already know that. All companies have websites now. Most have Wikipedia entries. Read them.
2. Play their most recent game. I guarantee you that it will come up in the interview. They’ll ask what you thought of it. Nobody will immediately dismiss you for not having played it, but it will throw a monkey wrench in the conversation. You don’t have to have finished it, but at least give it a couple hours until you feel you have a good sense for what works and didn’t work.
3. Research the people. Most of the time the recruiter will tell you who you’ll be talking to. Google them. They probably have pages on MobyGames or personal websites. Know the types of games and specific titles they’ve worked on. This lets you (a) avoid badmouthing someone’s past work [they may not like it either, but that’s not a safe assumption] and (b) “casually” drop how much you liked a game and then act surprised if they cop to having worked on it. You should only employ (b) if you actually did enjoy the game, though. Lying, pandering, or kissing ass doesn’t get you anywhere.
4. Hygiene. Seriously. Shower, deodorize, etc. before meeting someone for an interview. Wear clean clothes. Brush your teeth. Carry breath mints if you have to (much better than chewing gum). Yes, everyone knows stories about the genius developer with poor hygiene, but nobody really likes him that much and you aren’t as brilliant as he is.

Jumping Through Hoops

Some companies will have you do tests before moving to the next phase of the process. One studio had me take a written test — it was 23 questions, I had two hours, and had to answer 15. The test itself was actually considered confidential, otherwise I’d post some questions here, but they covered a broad range of topics from the business side of the industry to level design to system design to team dynamics. This was before I had even done a phone interview; when it actually came time to talk to the team, we had lots to discuss since they already had a big chunk of writing representing my thoughts on games.

Another studio had me do freeform essays, with subjects like “how do you think you can change the games industry?” If you’re getting a question like this, it’s now the time to pull out all your grandiose theories, ideas, and brilliant notions. Just keep it in check and don’t try to sound like a revolutionary if you’re not one.

Sometimes you’ll get asked to submit samples of your work. This can be hard if you don’t have much actual work to show, so get cracking! It was especially hard in my case because I had spent the last three years on a game that is still under a non-disclosure agreement. I was able to retrofit some of the systems I had been working on and present them in a context unrelated to my old project. Tricky business.

One studio asked me to make a sample level for their recent game using the mod tools they had released. They also said “if you have anything else already done, that’s fine, too,” but I interpreted a big implicit “build something using our tools” in there. This is where they want to see if you understand the type of game they make, how quickly you can learn a toolset, and whether you can actually build something. My biggest problem with the sample I made for that studio was when to call it done — as one person working by myself (and not being an artist), I could have spent months polishing and getting something up to shipping quality. My guess, though, was that they were a development team used to seeing unfinished work and wanted to get a sense of what kind of designer I was. So that means polishing the areas I wanted them to see (for me story, dialogue, characters), and including in my writeup that I’d like to improve the weaker elements (level layout, visual richness).

The Phone Interview

Most companies, if they find your resume decent-looking and have a potential open slot¹, will do a phone interview. I strongly remember Jesse Schell telling me the number one purpose of a phone interview: “To determine if the candidate is a raving lunatic.” That’s pretty much it. If you’re doing the phone interview, that means they already like the look of your resume, and think you might have some skills they could use. The worry is that you might be a raving lunatic with a nice resume, so they want to hear you talk. Your answers to the questions are also important, but it’s crucial that you seem upbeat, intelligent, passionate about games, and able to articulate your ideas. (I’ll get to the actual questions in a bit.)

You’d be amazed at how quickly you can make a decision based on a phone call. I had two phone interviews with one studio — the first with a lead designer which went well. The second interview had the studio manager on the line, and he lead with “What didn’t you like about [our last game]?” So I told him, having previously sketched out my list of pros and cons while prepping for the interview. His next question was “What else didn’t you like?” So I told him some more issues I had with it. Again he asked for more. In retrospect, this is the point where I should have shut up and said “that pretty much covers it,” but I did think the game had other problems, so I continued.

After about 10 minutes of just me and the manager going back and forth like this, he very quickly said “OK, thanks, we’ll be in touch.” I knew I had bombed, and that instinct was confirmed by a call from HR the next day. I didn’t come off as a raving lunatic (I hope), but I did seem like someone who wasn’t really that interested in the types of games they made.

The On-Site Interview

If the phone interview (or series of phone interviews) goes well, the studio will often want to meet you in person. This is the really fun part of the process, since you get to feel like a big-shot getting flown around the country (or world) and put up in swanky hotels. If you enjoy traveling (I do), this is terrifically exciting. If you don’t, this is all the traveling parts of traveling with very little of the sightseeing parts, so it can be stressful.

The actual interview can take many forms. One studio flew me all the way across the country for an interview that lasted just two hours, one of which was lunch. That’s very unusual in my experience, however. Most of the time your interview will last a good part of a working day, and you’ll talk to five or six groups of people in that time.

The on-site interview also serves as a “raving lunatic” test, but it’s more a time to see how you might fit in the studio culture. Your answers to questions are much more important than they were before.

In-person interviews can be intimidating. In one case, I was sitting across the table from one of my boyhood game development idols while he pitched his new project to me. Terrifying on one level, but also part of the steady, consistent demystification of game development that I’ve had since I started working. He’s just a guy. A really smart guy, but he’s not entirely sure how this game is going to get made, whether it will be good, or how to approach certain problems. Just like me! Only with more game-of-the-year awards and industry respect. :-)

Questions

Then there’s the all-important issue of what you get asked at a design interview. A lot of it depends on what kind of role they’re considering for you. One studio drew a simple level on a whiteboard and then asked me to redesign it with no more specific goal than “better.” Another asked me to design a game system to model the messiness of a room. I was asked to place myself on a triangle with the corners labeled “Programmer,” “Designer,” and “Producer.” I designed games around matchsticks as well as Cheers: The Video Game (yes, that Cheers). These questions are mostly to see how you approach a problem, how you communicate it, how you deal with feedback (when they start poking holes in it), and, at a raw level, whether your ideas are any good. Bombing a question like this won’t be held against you too much, since in a real design situation you have more time to think and consider the material. More practical tests like the whiteboard level design could have an output factor, though, since it’s a lot easier to say “that level is now better” than it is to say “you’ve created a good messy-room model.”

Practically all the interviews opened with something along the lines of “give us a quick rundown of your history.” You’ll get asked this question a lot. On the phone, in person, over e-mail. Usually the person asking the question already has your resume in front of them — they’re pretty much looking for you to give them the narrative behind it. Practice this spiel, since you’ll be giving it many times. The real trick is to only tell the relevant bits without leaving huge gaps in the story. My spiel picks up at the beginning of grad school, gives a quick rundown of the projects I worked on, follows me out to my first internship, back to grad school, then to my second internship and eventual job. Oftentimes you’ll get interrupted during this if the interviewer finds something interesting or knows somebody where you worked. “How big was the robot?” “Oh, did you work with Todd?” Don’t let your pre-rehearsed spiel keep steamrolling — your audience is engaged! Answer their questions!

You will get asked what you think about the studio or group’s most recent release (assuming they aren’t a new studio). Sometimes there’s generic “how would you improve it?” questions; other times there’s more specific “how would you add vehicles to it?” questions. Also read the reviews of the game so you have a high-level notion of what people liked and didn’t like about it. (You can do this in about 20 minutes by just reading the reviews linked from Metacritic. Make sure to read reviews that loved the game, ones that hated it, and ones in the middle. Best to stick with reputable sites, but all opinions can be valid.) That way you can say things like “I know a lot of people seemed to be frustrated with [system X] and I think [tweak Y] could have mitigated a lot of that.” You’re showing that you know how to make small iterative changes that improve a design, rather than just throwing everything out to start from scratch (even though they probably already had your idea but couldn’t implement it for any number of reasons). It paints you in their mind as someone who can come in at any stage of a project and have impact. Very frequently in our interviews we would find candidates we liked, but said “she’s really more of a big-picture designer, and we need more nitty-gritty people right now.” The tendency in a design interview is to show your ability to have grand thoughts, when what most studios are looking for (especially at the junior level) is people who can work a craft.

A lot of studios do the ever-so-trendy “Microsoft questions;” things like “How would you catch 100 butterflies in an hour?” and “How would you move Mount Fuji?” I detest these kinds of questions, personally, since I don’t think they actually help you learn about the candidate. In theory they showcase ability to think on your feet, apply strategies to novel situations, etc. But in reality the only really memorable answers are the glib or quippy ones. Even if the candidate shows some interesting lateral thinking, it’s just as likely to be a random stroke of luck as anything else. So I don’t ask them when I interview, but they’re out there and a lot of interviewers love them, so be ready. (It’s worth noting that Microsoft doesn’t even use these types of questions anymore, preferring more practical tests.)

One last thing it may be worth doing is playing some of the games to which the studio’s most recent game was compared (the Metacritic survey is helpful here, too). Especially if they came out around the same time or on the same system. I promise you that the team spent a lot of time following competitors’ development (usually not in a reactive sense, but just to know what they’re up against or how the market is responding to games of their type). They’ll have some thoughts on it; you should, too.

Yes, this means prep for an interview could involve playing several different games. But you’re a game designer — don’t you like doing that anyway?

After the Interview

Then you wait. Sometimes this can take a while — during one particularly long stretch of waiting for a studio in which I was very interested, a friend admonished me “Never plan a party or quitting your job based on when the HR rep said they’d get back to you.” Final decisions can sometimes take a while. You don’t want to be a bother, but pinging the HR rep every now and then isn’t too bad. Making you wait isn’t necessarily a bad thing: realize that a “no” will usually be decided pretty quickly, whereas a “yes” can take several levels of approval.

Take this time to send Thank You notes to the people you interviewed with, any contacts who helped get you in the door, or anyone who served as a reference. One of the best professors I ever had was very big on Thank You notes, and it’s something I try to keep up as much as I can. The note doesn’t have to be long or flowery. (Again, you don’t want to come off as a kiss-ass.) If you accept an offer, tell the people who helped you get it, and show your appreciation in a suitable way (“I owe you a beer next time I see you,” or buying something small from their Amazon wishlist, etc.). This person just helped land you a job — show some gratitude!

Finally, be prepared for weird things to happen. One studio closed down two weeks after they had me out there for an interview. I turned down an offer from another place only to get a call from the HR rep a few days later saying “I’m working at a different studio in the same city now; would you like to interview for a position here?”

I’ll Stop Blabbering Now

Hopefully this gives some insight into the somewhat mysterious process by which studios find new designers. There’s definitely a lot of magic and guesswork involved on both sides, and it’s clearly not a science.

Then again, neither is game design. :-)

¹ There are some companies (usually the “prestige companies”) that never truly have open positions and simply hire smart people as they find them. This makes it very hard to get in the door, as they typically just respond “we have no open positions,” when what they mean is “you don’t impress us enough.” Having a contact here is more or less the only way to get in. (Shipping a AAA title as lead designer would probably also work, but then you wouldn’t be reading my blog about design interviews, now, would you.)

Why are Black Game Characters Failing the Audience?

While I agree with his premise (that black characters are under-represented in games, and heavily stereotyped where they do appear), I think the piece doesn’t really build up much of an argument, and mostly serves as a “look, see?” kind of writing. He also extols the virtues of Will Smith as a popular black media star while ignoring the usual criticisms that Smith has honed his image to be as non-black (and thus non-threatening to white audiences) as possible. I know not all game writing has to be of critical literary value, but Edge usually does better than this.

While the article got me thinking, my point is a different one. And there’s a small tangent coming here, so please indulge me.

In Their Shoes

Before I found myself in games, I was a theatre person through-and-through. I mostly focused on directing with the occasional splash of playwriting or lighting design, but like all theatricals, I acted from time to time¹. I remember doing exercises about trying to think, move, and behave like another person. “How would Creon brush his teeth?” “Would Macbeth eat all his food at once, or one item at a time?” And so on.

While going through this process, it dawned on me why artists were traditionally viewed as “liberal.” When those around me decried Hollywood as a place of deviants, what they were really referring to is the overwhelming sense of tolerance they express².

And that’s the crux of it — actors are trained to place themselves in someone else’s shoes. To think how they would react to something. A straight actor can think through: “OK, I’m not gay, but if I was, how would I act towards this person? How would I feel?” Any actor who sticks around long enough also tries to make their portrayal real instead of a caricature, and so they’re forced to find the truth, the humanity, in someone who is potentially very different from themselves.

They Used to Call Them “Players”

So what does this have to do with games? We frequently cite the participatory nature of games as their defining one. But we nearly always plop the player into some character that’s already been vastly over-represented in media: nearly always white, nearly always male, nearly always 18-35³.

Games have such a power to make players identify with a protagonist, and it feels like they’re squandering it by going with the easy path for this fundamental design choice. Why not have a game that really gives me the experience of being a young black boy in South Central LA? Or a woman in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Or a young mother in China who desperately wants to save the baby girl her husband abandons? A gay man in the American South? Or in Africa?

These games don’t even have to be about the Serious Issues™ that I described — you could still make a decent adventure or shooter out of most of those with some effort. But why not use the great identifying force of avatar representation and use it to make the player think “OK, I’m not this person, but how would I react if I were?”

¹ By the end of my theatrical career, the acting roles were solely based on my knowledge of stage combat. I would get in costume, take a punch, throw a punch, then not even have stick around for the curtain call. It was great fun. :-)

² I don’t in any way mean to over-simplify or mock the conservative viewpoint — I grew up in a very conservative household and tend to think most issues are far more complex than either side is willing to admit.

³ I used up my “nearly always” quota on that sentence.

When I left EA in earlier this year, they were cool enough to let me take our engine, called “Angel” with me, and gave me their blessing to open the source. With all the jamming going on right now, it seemed like a good time to get it up on the internets.

Angel’s project page on Google Code

It’s going to continue to evolve, hopefully. The trick is finding some other people to join me in the effort at this point, since it doesn’t sound like my compatriots left behind at EA are going to be allowed to contribute. :-(

But hey — an open-sourced game prototyping engine. Always a good thing, methinks.

Bethesda is one of the few companies left that creates a wholly authored game world. Every item is placed; every NPC has a script; every quest has been thought out in advance. There are definite upsides to this approach — predictability in testing, being able to create complex interlocking quest systems, and imbuing the world with a level of intricate detail that players don’t see anywhere else. The downsides of this approach are (a) because the systems can get so intricate, they sometimes break in weird ways (oh, wait, because I killed that guy before I started the quest, now I can never finish it), and (b) the authoring effort scales linearly (if you want twice as much content, you need twice as much time or twice as many designers).

The Far Cry 2 team at Ubisoft, though, took a more systemic approach. They created a set of simple, robust systems and let the low-level story emerge from there. They place a thin veneer of high-level narrative to give the player some direction, and then let the game systems play themselves out. This takes a different breed of designer (thinking systemically rather than strictly experientially), and makes testing difficult since you’re almost never able to totally reproduce a given set of circumstances. Logging and metrics become crucial. The upsides are that the player often feels a stronger sense of ownership in the moment — the feeling of “I thought of something, and it worked” or “I made that happen.” Systemic gameplay also makes it a bit easier to author new content, once you have those robust systems in place.

As a game designer and narrative systems dork, I’m much more interested in the approach of FC2. But at the end of the day, I have a lot more fun (and am more likely to want to play) Fallout 3. I’m not entirely sure what I think about that. It’s probably because FC2 doesn’t really get all the way there, but is an interesting step in the right direction, whereas Fallout 3 is a very polished experience from the older school.