Category Archives: Game Design
The Barriers Of Entry To A Career In Game Design
“What are the barriers of entry to game design?” one hopeful video game designer asked me a few days ago. I had to look up the term to make sure I understood what he meant. “Barriers to entry: the existence of high startup costs or other obstacles that prevent new competitors from easily entering an industry or area of business.” That was helpful, because I immediately came up with three barriers to entry for a video game design job.
One barrier to a video game job is indeed competition: there are far more people wanting to be game designers, and think they have the skills to be game designers, then there are openings. To break into the field professionally, you need to have a portfolio of work demonstrating your game design skills, which begs the age-old question, “How do I get experience if I can’t get hired do to lack of experience?” The answer to that question is that you have to build up a portfolio on your own, perhaps as part of your schoolwork if you are pursuing a game design or development degree, or by volunteering for an indie team.
This is where the high startup cost comes into play, but not cost in terms of money. The cost is the acquisition of skills, another barrier of entry to a game design job. Being a successful game designer involves a cornucopia of skills. Coming up with a game design requires you not just to have experience playing games, but a deep understanding of what makes games engaging. Then the game needs to be designed in such a way that the development team can implement, so a game designer needs to have a fundamental understanding of programming, art, and audio principles. Explaining that design to the rest of the team also requires good written and spoken communication skills, as well as skills of persuasion to convince everyone to follow your vision. It also helps to have some knowledge of math, physics, history, mythology, storytelling, and other subjects, depending upon the type of game you’re making.
A third barrier is ignorance: many people who want to become game designers have little idea of what the work entails. Many think that it is about coming up with ideas, stories or art for games, when really it is mostly about tweaking the controls, difficulty, rules, systems and object properties over and over and over again based on playtesting feedback until the game is fun enough for players.
Even then, video game design is not an entry level position. Most game designers start off as programmers, artists, level designers, assistant producers testers, or some other development position. Then, if a game design opportunity opens and they’ve gained the trust of the hiring manager, they may move upward or laterally to a game design position.
While none of these barriers are insurmountable, they can be difficult and time-consuming to overcome. But if you’re very passionate about games, then you should already have acquired years of experience in overcoming difficult and time-consuming obstacles, right?
Supercharging Your Product Design With Game Thinking
Much of my time these days is devoted to teaching game production at The Los Angeles Film School, as well as giving live talks and virtual lectures on the topic of game design to everyone from boy scouts to industry professionals. Still, I was absolutely thrilled when Amy Jo Kim invited me to be a coach at her Game Thinking Live training event being held March 31 to April 1 in San Francisco.
For those of you not familiar with her work, Amy Jo is an accomplished social game designer, community architect and startup coach. She is well known for her 2000 book, Community Building on the Web, and her 2012 TEDx talk, “Collaboration & Community-Building”. In addition to earning a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington, her expertise is based on her work on such products as Rock Band, The Sims, Ultima Online, Happify, eBay, and Netflix.
Amy Jo has drawn upon her experiences of creating innovate products to develop an integrated system for accelerating innovation and driving sustained engagement. Called “Game Thinking”, it is a powerful blend of game design, systems thinking, agile/lean practices, and design thinking built upon the following development pillars used by game designers when making games:
- Build a community of Super Fans — your most passionate, early customers — to provide early feedback on your product and then later expanding your playtesting from that base to a larger group of target customers.
- Build and test your core product from the inside out by first focusing on the product’s core interaction loop.
- Tinker and prototype without assuming that your first idea is the right one.
By leveraging Amy Jo’s Game Thinking system, entrepreneurs have learned how to innovate faster and smarter, and to build products that people love to come back to.
Amy Jo is now putting together as high-impact two-day training event to teach entrepreneurs the tools and techniques of Game Thinking, and give them a blueprint for building products that are as engaging as games. The event will introduce participants to the designers and innovators who’ve created successful businesses with Game Thinking, and provide hands-on training and support that will super-charge product design.
A ticket to the event provides a package of benefits that includes:
- An introductory online course before the event, with short videos and step-by-step templates that take you through the basics of Game Thinking at your own pace.
- The two day-event, where on Day 1 participants will learn the foundations of Game Thinking through real-life Case Studies, and on Day 2 apply the Game Thinking Toolkit to your project with coaching and support from guest experts & peers.
- After the event, continue learning and stay in touch with the people you met in the Game Thinking Academy — a curated learning community of experts and enthusiasts.
Sound interesting? If you’re a startup CEO, game developer, UX pro, design leader, product manager, agile expert, or innovation executive, this event may be just right for you! To find out more, visit Game Thinking Live.
David Mullich 