Getting into Games: You need to play games!

So building on from last week’s article, there’s been a few comments which is ace…I’ll not address each and every one but I will just say that what I write here has to be non-specific advice and will not map onto every individual instance…history is full of people who succeeded without a solid core education and this will continue into the future…this series of articles is all about boosting your chances of getting your dream job and will focus on the key elements that give you the best chance of success…

So what I’m saying is, if you don’t have qualifications then it isn’t game over, you just need to find a way to positive spin what you have instead…

In the future I’ll talk about most of them but suffice to say for now that there are many ways into the industry, some more expedient than others…regardless of which route you’re gonna try, what you need to understand is that you are not alone…sadly, for you, there are literally hundreds of people just like you who also want to land that precious break-through job…so the key question is how do you get noticed?

If you’re trying to break into the industry then I’m assuming you’re going to be targeting a more junior position and will work your way up…think about this, you don’t need to be the best designer or coder or artist in the world right at the start of your career…instead you need to be able to make the person interviewing you believe that you have the potential to be a star in the future…the key word is potential…what you are selling is what you could become not what you are right now...cool?

The following will help you to a) understand if this kind of job is actually for you, b) give you some solid grounding upon which you can start demonstrating your potential and c) make you different, in a good way, from dozens of other applicants!

But be warned, once you start doing this, you will find it very hard to stop doing it and it may well spoil how you play games from now on! Curious?

Let's assume you wanna get into design (but this works for any discipline, you just need to tweak the questions to suit)…what you need to do is pick a gaming genre and become an “expert” in it…take first-person shooters for example…the fun bit, make sure you have played as many games of this type as possible, and not just the good ones either! 

This gives you breadth of knowledge, so when you’re in an interview and someone asks you what games you’re playing (and they will) then you can talk about all the FPS games you’ve and not just COD or BF3…

The next step takes our breadth and gives you depth of knowledge...you’ll be able to talk confidently about what you liked, didn’t like, felt could be improved, what changes you would make and why…how? Read on…

When you’re playing you need to stop playing as a gamer and start playing as an game analyst…I warn you again, once you start doing this it will fuck you up in terms of being able to enjoy games just for games sake in the future! You have been warned!

When you’re analysing a game you need to sit down with a pad of paper and a pencil and take lots of notes…pause the game often to take these notes don’t just play the game and hope to remember them later…think about every second, every minute, every hour of your experience and what factors are affecting how you feel, what you're doing, why you’re doing it etc. etc.

Every time you pause the game, think specifically about:

How the geometry/environment is set out and how that affects the gameplay…

How many enemy types are there…what makes this fun?

Where do the enemies spawn/appear from? Why?

How many waves are there? Why?

What is the composition of the waves…how does it affect gameplay?

How does the lighting affect the experience?

What is the mood/atmosphere? Why have they made it like that?

The music, what is that doing? Why?

How is the story told through the game? Why did they do it like that?

What are you feeling while playing it…why?

How would you improve it?

And so on…obviously these questions are neither exhaustive or universal…tweak them to suit your chosen genre and feel free to come up with more…

Do this over and over and over and over…and then start spreading to other genres...become a student of the industry...know games inside out...

Trust me, do this now while you're young and have the time and you'll use this knowledge base for the rest of your career...wait until you have kids and a mortgage and you'll never find the time to do i properly...

This habit I want you to get into will mean you can confidently and expertly talk about games of a specific genre with a view to an interviewer thinking ‘this guy know his stuff, he may well make me look awesome for hiring him so I’ll give him a chance as a junior designer’.

Especially if what you learn from your analysis can then be demonstrated in your own levels…but more on this next week…

As always, please comment…its great getting feedback…let me know if there’s any specific areas/topics I could cover…

And if you can, spread the word…tweet this, facebook it…sky-write it in the sky…cheers!