This interview with me is about 9 months old at this point but I think the article was only published in the early summer. In it I discuss how I broke into the game industry, whether I think QA is a viable way to get into the industry, and my career path up until my job as Lead Analyst at Blue Fang Games. (I’m no longer at Blue Fang but I was at the time of the interview.) Excerpt:

“For me, it’s really a holistic process, and I don’t believe that driving your entire game design through metrics is a good solution. There are a lot of dangers to doing that. Like if you set your goal for the amount of time people spend in your game to be between 10 and 30 minutes, and then you see people who are spending two hours in the game, you might think that’s bad for some reason—it’s an outlier. It’s not what you expected, and you’re thinking something’s wrong with the design. Is the player stuck? Are they unable to read a screen? You need to investigate that, not immediately squash it. People might be spending two hours in the game because they’re taking videos, or maybe they’re choreographing a big dance routine. If your instinct is to just take all the curves and normalize them, you could miss out on a lot of the fun that happens in the outliers of those curves. I’m very much about collecting a lot of data, coming up with the right questions to ask around it, and then using that data to investigate further and further.”

Read the full interview here.

Ian Schreiber sends me this question from a student:

I want to get into the game industry [as a designer, some day]. I figured why not start a blog about game design to talk about some the games I’m studying and to share some of the great stuff I’ve been reading online about games?

However, when I started poking around at other blog of people in the industry particularly people who weren’t prominent, I noticed most of them were anonymous. I started to worry: is it a good idea to start a blog about game design, or is that the kind of thing that’ll get you shunned when you go look for a job? For instance, if I say something about Madden having weak gameplay, and I later apply to EA, is that going to reflect badly, and is that why a lot of bloggers I’ve found go by pseudonyms or go completely anonymous?

If you’re trying to get into the industry on the development side, is it a good idea to start a blog? Do the benefits outweigh the potential risks?

I started a non-anonymous blog while I was a student, so I have a bunch of thoughts about the subject. The short answer is: yes, start a blog, and yes, attach your name to it.

I have nothing against people who choose to remain anonymous on the internet. A lot of people have very good reasons to do so. However, if you’re starting a blog about what you do (or want to do) professionally, I recommend against the anonymous route. You’re (hopefully) writing awesome stuff that could some day help you get a job. You should be proud of what you write, and you should get credit for it!

What your blog should contain

On a professional blog I expect to see four basic types of post.

1. Critical thought. This is where you might critique a game you’ve been playing, write about gender issues in the industry, compare one developer’s style against another, respond to someone else’s blog post, and so on. These are analytical and theoretical pieces.
2. Other people’s useful information. “Here’s something I find useful, maybe you will too.” Perhaps you’re sharing some resources for CC-licensed assets, or pointing your readers to a website with good articles about game development, or just linking to a good blog. I try to include more than one resource in these posts (“5 websites I use to find free sound effects” or the like). If I only have one resource to share, I share it on Twitter.
3. Your own useful information. Better than linking to other people’s info is providing your own. I try to publish as many original tutorials as I can.
4. Developer diaries. I love posts that chronicle the creation of a game. These are some of my favorite to see, especially on a student blog. It helps me get a sense of the student’s work ethic and style. But I love professional dev diaries too.

There are certainly other types of posts that you’ll see on professional blogs, but those four categories cover about 80% of what’s out there.

How to criticize

Notice that nowhere in that list does it say “be a jerk” or “put down someone else’s work.” The aforementioned student is essentially asking: “What if I criticize game X, then interview for a job with that developer; am I ruining my chances of getting hired?”

It really depends on how you go about criticizing a game. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but just in case: don’t be a complete idiot and say things like “Madden sucks, I can’t believe so many people buy it” or “anyone who plays Farmville is an idiot” or whatever. Those are so obviously wrong I won’t spend any more time talking about why you shouldn’t write things like that. I’ve already written about why you shouldn’t badmouth people.

But there are more insidious ways to shoot yourself in the foot while criticizing a game or a developer.

Avoid making assumptions

Wrong: Alpha Protocol is full of bugs that sometimes force me to replay an entire level. I have no idea why Obsidian would release such a buggy game, but I think it does a huge disservice to what could have been an excellent game.

Right: Alpha Protocol is full of bugs that sometimes force me to replay an entire level. I don’t know if it was the developer or the publisher who decided to release such a buggy game, but whoever it was did a huge disservice to what could have been an excellent game.

The first case makes the common newbie assumption that if a game is buggy, it’s the developer’s fault. That’s not always true — if you know anything about the way the developer/publisher relationship works, you’ll write something more like the second case. Both statements make exactly the same point, but if you were interviewing at Obsidian and they read your review of Alpha Protocol, the first case might hurt you; the second case would probably make a decent conversation topic in an interview!

The bottom line about assumptions is that you shouldn’t make them: stick to facts you know are true. The best way to do that is to criticize a game or a developer’s body of work on its own merit.

If you must be negative, be usefully negative

It’s okay to point out flaws in a game. No developer will claim that their game is without flaws. On the contrary, developers are often their own harshest critics. But if you’re going to single out a flaw, be sure to apply some analysis to it. Put yourself in the shoes of the developer: think about why they might have made the design decision that they did, and think about possible design alternatives. For example, you might set out to criticize a loot system in an MMO, but after thinking it through come to the conclusion that it may have been implemented that way to ensure secure item transactions or prevent spoofing from the game client.

Remember that the internet is forever

Assume that everything you write will be available for everyone to see for the rest of your life. Even if you delete a post, even if your website is offline, there are places like archive.org and Google’s cache where people can still pull things up. Don’t ever write anything online that you don’t feel confident assigning your name to.

Don’t be too worried

All of this talk about what not to do may discourage from writing at all — far from it! When in doubt, write. If you stick to the four basic types of blog posts I mentioned above, and do your best not to be a dick, even your (eventual, unavoidable) mistakes will be okay in the end. Game developers are a forgiving bunch. When I had my interview with Turbine (who ended up being the game company that would hire me out of college), my future boss indicated that he’d read this rather lamentable post I’d made, and commented on the “big stinking liars” part. Fortunately it was all in good humor, but yeah, that was a close call!

(Update: Zack Hiwiller’s response to this post reminds me: when I was working at Turbine, I NEVER blogged about stuff at Turbine, except to sometimes point to official press stuff about a game I was working on. I never felt comfortable taking that risk, and I still think that was a good move.  I was up front with my managers that I had a blog but was not going to blog about my job, and fortunately they were cool with that.)

I got some great comments on my last post about business cards, and I’m going to highlight them here in case you missed them. But first I’m going to subject you to a little rant that I’ve given at conferences.

Corporate vs. Personal Cards

There are two kinds of business cards. There’s the card that represents you as the employee of a company, and there’s the card that represents you as a person. The key difference is that the company card puts the identity of the company over your own identity. Here’s an example of a corporate business card:

Notice how much space the logo takes up, and how small the font is for the person's name.

The logo and the address of the company take up most of the non-white space on the card.

Now don’t get me wrong: this is a fine corporate business card. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But it sets a bad example for personal business cards. I often see students (and even professionals!) emulate the design of corporate cards on their personal cards, sometimes going so far as to design a logo and make that the biggest thing on their card.

Your personal card should reflect who you are. I don’t mean that in the warm and fuzzy sense: it literally needs to tell me who you are so I can remember you. This means your name should be the biggest thing on the card by far.

Here’s an example of a great personal business card.

It's memorable because it's funny.

The card above is from an excellent article about business cards for musicians (although the advice applies to anyone). There’s nothing fancy about it in terms of card stock or font or color. It’s completely unremarkable except that it’s well-designed and memorable. The guy’s name is the biggest single information band on the card, and right under that it tells me what he does. There’s contact information below, and then in the corners there are some tongue-in-cheek descriptors of the guy’s services. (This is a great technique for someone to use — provided you remember that this card has a context. Specifically this is a card that will be given to other musicians. “Bad attitude” and “always late” are things that will make a fellow musician laugh. If this same musician were trying to get booked to play weddings, the joke would completely backfire.)

Anyway, remember: you are not an anonymous drone. Your business card needs to reflect that.

Comment Roundup

I got some great comments on my business card post.

While I recommended Scribus for those designing their own business cards, Noah Kantrowitz pointed out Businesscardland, a website where you can design a card from templates for free. It’ll even render a PDF that you can take to a print shop.

Jeromie Walters asked whether he should put a head shot of himself on his card. Brenda Brathwaite once told me that she tried putting her head shot on her card, and the only thing it did was make her feel like a real estate agent! Bottom line: don’t put a photo of yourself on your card. Consider a cartoon or an abstraction of your face. It’s what I do.

Ian Schreiber talked about the backpack he always brings to GDC.

As for running out during the day, personally I always carry my backpack with me. In it I have:
* All of my cards, so I can “restock” in a few seconds rather than having to head back to the hotel;
* Notebooks and pens, both to take notes myself and to offer to the people sitting next to me if they need it;
* Laptop computer and power cord, also for taking notes and in case anyone needs one to show a software demo or something;
* Emergency snacks and drinks, so that I’m never in a session where I’m distracted from a brilliant speaker by something mundane like bodily hunger signals (and likewise, headache medicine in case my skull picks a bad time to vasodilate);
* Board games, because I want people to think of me when they’re trying to find the fun 
* Any swag or random stuff I pick up along the way.

My shoulders are usually sore by the end of the week from walking around like a pack mule, but the convenience of having everything I need in reach at a moment’s notice is too great to give up.

Alex Forsythe asked how a student should communicate their area of expertise on their business card, since a student can’t really claim to be a level designer if they haven’t really designed many levels. I responded that “Aspring Level Designer” or “Student of Level Design” would be fine. Ian Schreiber gave the following response:

I’ve seen some pretty clever student business cards. Darius wrote his tagline “a generally useful guy to know” which, aside from being accurate, was more memorable than “aspiring game programmer/designer” or whatever.

I saw one student card, I still have it somewhere, that introduced the person as “the mythical female programmer”… again, more memorable than “aspiring.”

I suppose you need to be careful with this, though. It’s easy to cross the line from “memorable” to “cliche” or “cheesy”. So maybe that kind of thing is best for your second year at GDC, after you’ve already seen what other cards are out there.

As always, thanks to everyone who commented for their good questions and helpful answers.

Update, June 2010: Erin Hoffman has additional advice:

Ian’s point is a great one. It’s the one thing I would add to Darius’s advice… I suspect for first-timers the words on the card are actually more important than the card’s visual design, though it’s certainly possible to excessively advertise non-pro status by having a business card that looks out-of-date, is too busy, or has poorly printed graphics. The worst one I saw from a student was glossy and black with a grainy graphic of something on it — I’m not even sure what. A classy but plain non-glossy white card with Times New Roman on it is much safer.

When I was a student I had “Creativity for Hire” on my card, which got comments from most of the people I handed it to. I didn’t really even expect that reaction — I just had an assortment of things I wanted to do and needed a broad phrase that would capture them. And I didn’t have that card very long. :) If I had to do it over again I would stick to the same — keep it simple, put your web address on the card, and aim your thought energy at a memorable (unique) phrase that encapsulates what you have to offer

Jim Rivers, the Hiring Manager for Obsidian Entertainment (KoToR 2, NWN 2, Alpha Protocol) gave a great talk at the Austin GDC Game Career Seminar about resumes, cover letters, and websites. It was specifically geared towards newly graduated students — some of his advice doesn’t apply to seasoned vets. I just found out that his presentation is available for download (direct link to a ZIP file containing a PPT).

Here are some of the most important points of the presentation:

• If you lack industry experience but have worked on lots of game stuff as an intern or for school or in your spare time, you should use a functional resume (a resume that is organized by the skills you have rather than your employment history). If you have industry experience, you should have chronological resume (this is a “normal” resume where you list out your job experience over time).
• His preferred cover letter is broken into three sections: an intro where you create interest in yourself, the body where you talk about why you want to work for this company in particular, and a closing where you state that you’d like to be interviewed for the job. Pretty simple.
• If you’re an artist, organize your work on your online portfolio by genre or type (fantasy/scifi/contemporary, or perhaps rigging/modeling/2D). This helps potential employers quickly find the type of stuff that they are interested in.

There’s a whole lot more very specific advice in the presentation, I highly recommend that anyone who’s in school and wants to get a job in the game industry read it and take its advice to heart.

Whenever I get a resume from a student looking for an internship, I end up giving them an impromptu resume critique. I give the same advice over and over, so I decided to just write it up here. Next time I get a resume from someone I will just send them a link to this article.

Forget What You’ve Been Told

I know you’ve probably read your college career center guidelines on writing resumes. Understand this: college career centers are designed to get you a job at a giant faceless company doing something like, I dunno, paper distribution or enterprise databases. These career centers generally know nothing about getting you a job in the game industry. Most game companies are small. Almost all game companies have fewer than 1,000 employees. In fact, most game companies employ fewer than 200 people, and many game companies are in the 30 to 100 person range.

Your college career center tells you to include a clear objective at the top. All of your contact information. Your complete employment history. Your education with relevant coursework. Honors and awards. Activities and special interests.

Your college career center is giving you mostly bad advice.

So throw that out the window. Pretend you never learned any of that stuff.

What a Resume is For

Remember this: the purpose of a resume is to get you an interview. That’s it. That’s all it’s for. I don’t care what is on your resume, if it intrigues me enough for me to want to set up a phone call or an on-site interview, your resume did its job.

Length, and Use of Space

Your resume should not be longer than one page, for a couple of reasons:

• Many game companies get scores of applications for internships and jobs. Imagine being the person screening all those applications. Brevity will be appreciated.
• If you are a college student, you have not done enough interesting stuff to merit a resume that is more than one page long. Once you’ve been in the industry for twenty years — yeah, you’ve earned it. Go wild and make it two pages!

Because you’re keeping it to one page, you have to view the resume as a game of limited resources, where the resource in question is space. When I’m reviewing a resume, I often look at it in terms of number of lines of text taken up by something.

I see resumes all the time with entries like this:

Work Experience

Yoyodyne Corporation, Boston, MA Summer 2008. Intern under John Smith and Jane Doe. Fixed computers, diagnosed network problems, maintained IT ticketing sytem.

Extracurricular

Baseball, Winter 2002 – Present. Awesome University: varsity team member. Hometown High School: team captain, led team to fifth place in regional championships.

This resume dedicates the same number of lines to baseball as job experience. What you are telling me is that your experience playing baseball is every bit as relevant as your experience working in IT. This is not a very good way to position yourself on a resume.

Here’s a much improved example:

Work Experience

Yoyodyne Corporation, Boston, MA Summer 2008. Diagnosed computer problems in both hardware and software, assisted in data recovery, placed purchase orders for office computers, adminstered a network of 200 computers including routers/switches/hubs, maintained our RT ticketing sytem, trained new IT interns on proper use of RT.

Extracurricular

College and High School Baseball, Winter 2002 – Present.

It’s the same number of lines as our previous example, but now you’ve managed to tell me more about your relevant work experience and reduced the baseball stuff to the only part that could be possibly relevant: you play baseball. I get it. (Also note that I got rid of the names of people you worked with. If I want to know who you worked with, I’ll ask.)

Formatting

I had a conversation with Jeff Ward about formatting. He thinks you should put your work experience in bullet point format, because it’s more readable that way. I happen to like a comma-separated list, because I like the information density. I think formatting on that level just comes down to the particular person reading the resume, so I wouldn’t sweat it.

I will say this: keep your resume clean, make good use of negative space, put your name in pretty big font, and cram all your contact information into the top inch of your resume. The reason for the last one is I often see resumes where the contact information takes up literally half the vertical space on the page. Again, it comes down to what’s important enough to use that space.

Here’s a quick example I just threw together of how the header might be laid out in my resume. Note that my name is big, and right below it is a short summary of why you might care about me. To the right of that information is my fake contact info, and to the right of that is my personal avatar to give you something to remember me by. Note that I built this in five minutes with Scribus, I did not pay any attention to alignment or font or sizes or whatever — this is merely to show you a general layout of elements on a page:

If you don’t want to use a package like Scribus to lay out your resume, you can use tables in Microsoft Word to the same effect — setting the tables to “invisible” will get you the same effect of stacking text in columns.

Stay Relevant

For the love of all things holy, recall that you are applying for a job in game development. I do not care that you were a sandwich artist at Subway. I do not care that you were a waiter.

The stuff you include doesn’t have to be game development per se, it just has to be relevant. I might care that you worked part time for your dad’s accounting firm, but only if you include specifically that you know a lot about Microsoft Excel from that experience. If you worked as an artist on an animated film, okay, now you’re in the realm of complete relevancy, even though that isn’t a game job per se.

And if you don’t have enough experience and can’t really fill all the space in your resume… maybe you should be spending your time doing things relevant to game development. Work on a game in your spare time, for example. That’s way more helpful than anything you’ll do for a random summer job.

Also, if you are in college, I don’t care about what you did in high school, unless it is very very specifically game related. So if you made some games in high school, let me know about those. If you ran a game review website in high school, by all means tell me. But I don’t care about other stuff. Your SAT scores? Useless to me. Student activities? Useless. Even your AP courses are useless — if you’re applying for a programming job, AP Computer Science is irrelevant because I would hope you’ve taken higher level computer science courses in college.

Include a Projects Section

Game developers don’t care about your credentials. Where you graduated from, what classes you took, that only matters a tiny bit. What we care about is what you have done. So please include a section for projects you’ve done. This includes games or mods you’ve made on the side, as well as non-trivial school projects (final projects for classes and the like).

I looked at a resume today that said the following:

Projects:

(Name of Game 1): A side-scroller game built using XNA 2.0

(Name of Game 2): A platform game built using XNA 3.0

That nice, and I’m really glad you’re letting me know you’ve built games in XNA. But could you be more descriptive? Maybe tell me some of the stuff you implemented for those games? Better yet, just include a URL to a web site where I can download the game, or see its source code, or even just view a video of some of the gameplay. That would all be excellent.

Speaking of which…

Link Me to Your Website

You should have a website with lots of interesting, relevant stuff on it. And then include the link in your resume. You can read more about this in my article about what your website should contain.

I am Not a Moron

It’s true. I’m not an idiot. So I can tell when you’re padding. Stop doing it, it makes you look like a desparate liar.

I Have Friends

Also true. If you claim to have worked at a game company, you’d better damn well have worked at that game company. Because I know people who work there, and I will call them and ask them about you. And if they say they never worked with you… woe betide, my friend. Woe betide. (And yes, this has happened before.)

Do Your Research

Look up information about the company you’re applying to. In the case of a small company like mine, look up information about me. About once a month I get a resume from a 3D artist looking for a position at a game company. I write them back to let them know that if they’d read our company’s website, they’d know that we essentially make database software for game developers and as such have no possible need for 3D artists.

This is a two-way street: if you research my company and send me a resume that’s chock full of all the database development work you did in college, I am almost guaranteed to get in touch with you.

There Are Always Exceptions

Be clever and think for yourself — my advice may not be right for you. For example, I said that I don’t care about stuff you did in high school. But if you look me up you’ll find out that I am really interested in hardware hacking. So if you did some robotics stuff in high school, you should throw it on the resume you send me, because I’ll probably find that interesting. That’s just smart. (But don’t include it on resumes you send to other people.)

Also, if you have made like a dozen games, and worked four different game development internships, and have done a ton of other relevant stuff, your resume doesn’t have to be one page long. It can be two pages long. But that’s only once you’ve cut everything that is not specifically game-related.

Steve Gaynor (2K Marin) just posted an excellent article on how to get noticed/hired as a game designer. His advice is, in a nutshell, “Make cool shit, and show it off to anyone and everyone.” Which also completely applies to art and programming as well. It also jibes with the inimitable Tom Sloper’s advice about game schools, namely that it doesn’t matter where you built your amazing portfolio, it just matters that you did build your amazing portfolio.

I was interviewed by Talented Young People about breaking in to the game industry. TYP is a UK-based organization that helps young people (who may have no idea where to start) get their “dream jobs.” Nothing super new in the interview for those of you who have been reading my blog, but it’s here for your perusal.

This week, Yahtzee succinctly encapsulated my feelings about gaming webcomics. I hate ‘em. They’re occasionally awesome, mostly just craptacular.

In other news, um, I’m speaking at Penny Arcade Expo in late August. I’ll be giving a talk called Breaking In: How to Get Your Foot in the Door. My session description:

So you’ve got skills and you’ve got passion, but you have no idea how you’re going to break into the game industry. You send out resumes, and nobody ever gets back to you. In this session, Darius Kazemi covers exactly how, even as a lowly student, you can make friends at game companies and eventually, maybe, turn those connections into a career.

I am actually incredibly excited about giving this talk. It’ll be the first really widely attended consumer show I’ve spoken at. Usually when I do a talk at a consumer show it’s part of CMP’s Game Career Seminar, but that’s a totally different audience: those attendees have to register way in advance to specifically see the career content. So they tend to be well-prepared, already in a game program at some school or another. I’m expecting a much more casual, “Hey, making games would be cool. I should go to this session” kind of crowd. It should be fun, and as usual I’ll be devoting at least 20 minutes to Q&A, because that’s what my audience usually finds most beneficial.

And if you’re a blog reader and attending PAX, track me down and say hi! You know how to find me.

James Portnow just posted an article on GameCareerGuide about what to do at GDC if you’re a student. The advice is mostly great, although I disagree strongly on a few points.

He says not to attend any lectures. And he predicts that he will be flamed for it. I’m about to flame him, but for a totally different reason than he was probably expecting. As I’ve said before, lectures are not a terribly good networking opportunity. I don’t think you should really be attending for the content so much as the rhetoric. What do I mean by this? When you attend a talk about, I dunno, real-time lighting or agile development or whatever, you should not just about those topics: you should learn how to talk about those topics! You learn the language, the lingo, the attitudes. For example, at that agile development talk, it’s less important to learn how they do agile at Studio X and more important to learn that at a lot of game companies, people play fast and loose with the agile rules and tend to view big-A Agile people as stuffy. This will help you blend in with professional game developers. It’s one of the reasons that pro devs had a hard time believing I was a student back in my student days. I would literally take notes on prevalent attitudes and trends.

He says to spend a day at the Career Pavilion. I agree, but only if you’re looking for a job. If you’re smart, you’re attending GDC not 4 months before graduation, but a number of years before graduation. Starting early is key. If you’re not looking for a job immediately, spend an hour or three browsing the Career Pavilion and picking up handouts with job descriptions, chatting with reps, but don’t waste your whole damn day there. The interesting people are probably out in the halls.

He also says to avoid talking to other students. This I think is a hugely bad piece of advice. Many of my closest game industry friends are people I befriended at GDC when we were both students. My lead programmer is someone I met at GDC when we were both students. What people don’t realize is that students who attend GDC are generally of a higher caliber than students in general, and that those students are probably going to be in the industry soon, even if you aren’t. As I’ve said before: your fellow n00bs are important. Especially at GDC. Obviously if you have a choice of having lunch with a student and lunch with a developer, you should go with the latter. Your student friend will understand. On the other hand, that’s often a false dichotomy: why not invite the student friend along for lunch? Now you spend time with a developer and there’s another student out there who thinks you are awesome.

In case you missed it, Chris Hecker and Jon Blow wrote up a set of things that newbies who want to enter the game industry should do. They cover some excellent points, and the article boils down to “make games, and think hard about them.” They wrote up the article as a critical response to an article on GameCareerGuide.com with 10 things a game industry newbie should do in 2008.

The list at GameCareerGuide admittedly reads a lot like the advice that I give, except you’ll note that in my introduction to my networking articles, I state that I’m writing all of my advice on the assumption that you already know your stuff when it comes to the meat of understanding games. (I even updated the intro to link to the Hecker/Blow article.) The GCG article certainly lacked that context.

The last thing that I want to create with my articles is a bunch of people who don’t anything about game development or game design who manage to charm their way into the industry, and then inevitably destroy it within 15 years.