Game Design Friday: omg hire me

Designing OMG Hire Me

Concept

In a way, I'd been designing "omg hire me" since the first early pangs of frustration during a recent job search process. The process was repetitive, and the longer I whirled around in the loop, the more I realized it was basically a game -- a game with a somewhat imbalanced and unfair degree of randomness in the mix. I knew I couldn't actually make this board game while in the loop myself; it would've been a bit too "meta" for my tastes. It took some distance to see the project through to fruition.

Design

It was a great "paper idea," to be sure. Player creates a resume, searches for a job, prepares an application, and submits. Then rinse repeat, rinse repeat, rinse repeat until one of the jobs actually calls back and requests an interview. The interview itself would be a game in its own right, the outcome of which would play a small role in the randomness of getting a job offer.

The brunt of the mechanics fell upon a standard deck of playing cards. In a perfect world I'd have the time and resources to develop a customized deck for the game. Still, working with the traditional 52-card deck forced my design in certain directions that admittedly took some of the guess-work out of the game's construction.

Elements like updating the resume became drastically simplified (if not entirely abandoned), and the idea of "professions" was introduced to add a small strategy layer to the game, with other player's decisions having an adverse effect on your own successes in a particular profession.

The most sizable piece missing is the "Interview" game. Ideally, the interview would be the strategy game hidden within the randomness. Pragmatically, it couldn't be done right in the time allotted for this project.

Result

I personally mourn the absence of the interview mini-game, but the rest of the title still adheres blisteringly close to the game's emotional concept. "omg hire me" is, if nothing else, an incredibly cynical game. I just like that judged purely on mechanics, a game could elicit such a description. In and of itself, that's an accomplishment in my book.