“Me? Oh, I make video games.”
This seems like a pretty innocuous statement. I mean, it’s just a job. It’s a fairly cool job (more on that later) but people have a lot of misconceptions about the industry and it tends to manifest in inaccurate statements. The two I hear most often?
1. “Oh, awesome! I wish I got paid to play video games all day!”
You know what? So do I! Because I don’t get to! Because that’s not my job! I make video games, I don’t play them all the time. When I do get to play a game at work, it’s the one I’m currently working on. And it’s broken. And I’ve played it approximately a hojillion times already, so all the playing runs together into one huge memory and I can’t tell today from yesterday and even the parts of the game I liked at one point make me want to stab myself in the face just so I don’t have to play this goddamn game anymore oh gods why won’t it stop someone make it stop!
Ahem. The other thing I hear about 50% of the time is this:
2. Oh, so you’re a programmer?
No. NO I AM NOT. I am a 3-D artist, damn it. I am not a programmer.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against programmers. I like the programmers at work. They’re all fairly nice and they don’t condescend to me when I have questions (like why the hell this particular texture has decided to render all blurry when all the others are fine) and they have an important job. They make the game go. Without programmers we would have no games, just movies. It just drives me batty that to so many people, programmers are apparently the only people involved in making games. Where do they think the pretty pictures come from? Programmers are important but so are the artists and the level designers. Without artists everyone would be playing The Adventures of Rhombus and Sphere in the Land of Cubes. Without level designers we’d just have extremely pretty 2-D games with no exploration. (And without producers, everyone would be probably be at lunch permanently.)
My name is Aimee. I am a 3-D artist. I am not a programmer, and I don’t get paid to play games. (Most of the time.)
Welcome to my blog.
Hey Aimee – don’t forget about everyone else! There’s QA, and Licensing, and Audio, not to mention “regular” jobs like Marketing, Finance, Administration, and Translation.
I think this is a great idea, since it seems like everyone always wants to know “How can I get a job like that.”
I didn’t forget them! In fact, I’m going to go over some of those positions in my later posts. I just would have been listing jobs for a looooong time had I done them all now.