And then there's the rockstar element, which many in the industry would tell you is firmly in the negative category. But an offshoot of that effect is the fact that even people who don't work on games tend to like talking about them and thinking about them. To them, it's often pretty obvious why someone would want to work here.
I think leading artists are attracted to games due to the nature of their "leading edge" implementation of rich media technologies. ... Games represent the ultimate level that today's rich media technologies can cumulatively be taken; how many websites are even interactive? Or digital signage? Currently, e-signage is nothing but boring broadcast media and 2-D Flash. The future is in two areas: real-time interaction with the user and real-time rendered i3D content. The game industry clearly maxes these two areas an order of magnitude beyond any other current entertainment medium (internet, TV, film, e-signage, mobile, etc.), and thus has the most potential to blow-away the audience, which is, of course, any artist's dream and purpose, especially commercially, and I assume we are talking about commercial artisans here. The future is brightest for gaming simply because gaming technology is the future of every other type of commercial rich media design undertaking.
- Wallace Jackson, Multimedia Producer, Mind Taffy Design
Balancing the sheer difficulty of persistently adapting to new technologies is the constant newness of the challenges faced in making games.
In the last job I had before I entered the industry, I one day said to my boss, "You know what I do when I get home from work? I write code, to remind myself that I actually like programming." My brain was rotting. I need the sort of challenges that the game industry presents, because otherwise, I get bored, and lose my motivation.
The biggest challenge I've overcome, so far, is losing an employer. I like working for startups, and a lot of them just don't make it in the long run. It's particularly perilous working for a developer that is hunting for a publisher while developing its first game. There's always the risk that you just won't find one before the money runs out.
- Tess Snider, Senior Games Systems Programmer, Trion World Network
Adding this all together, you get a pretty rosy picture of the types of people attracted to game development: they're smart, thriving on challenge; they're creative, not content merely to solve technical problems; they're ambitious, un-intimidated by the intensity of the market. But with the constant change dictated in games by shifting technologies and hardware comes a steady evolution within the process and discourse of the games themselves.
Evolving Aesthetics
Even as games are becoming more graphically sophisticated and continuing to dive into unexplored territories of interactivity, we're also truly starting to see an appreciation for narrative. I recently saw Wanted in the theatre, and I apologize in advance for offending those of you who liked it. Within the first five minutes, even my own impulse was, "This is like a videogame!" - and then I immediately realized, no, there was no way in hell a videogame narrative could get away with what Hollywood had thrown into Wanted. Titles like Bioshock continue to advance us into new thresholds of narrative excellence, and that advancement brings new creativity into our artistic and technical environment.
It's really a combination of passion, stubbornness and never being happier than when I'm doing the narrative equivalent of constructing a jigsaw puzzle in a hurricane. There's a lot to be done in the games storytelling sphere and people are much more open to addressing the problems of interactive narrative than they used to be.
Reconciling gameplay and story can sometimes be like dealing with a couple of awkward children. Gameplay says that Story smells of wee, and Story says that Gameplay threw her dolly in the wood chipper, etc. We just have to get those two little tykes to be friends and skip off into the sunset together, hand in hand. There's already a lot of pigtail pulling going on, so I think we're getting there.
On top of all the challenges, there's just so much drive and talent in this industry. Get the right combination and you really can work magic.
- Rhianna Pratchett, Scriptwriter & Narrative Designer, Overlord, Heavenly Sword, Mirror's Edge
