Down
the Pipe:
Want to Play Games for a Living?
|
Vol.
2, Issue 5
December 10, 1999
|
You could
stand around the water cooler and discuss your favorite technique
in Age of Empires, and the boss would pass by and nod.
Heck, you’re hard at work. Fire up WarCraft III on
your computer and check out the lovely cinematics. Yep, gotta
keep up on what the competitor is doing. Better play a campaign
or two just to be sure. Shout at the top of your lungs: “That
fucker fragged me!” and no one will care (well maybe they
might, but nearly as much as the stinkhole environment most of
us work in).
But we’re
not like that, are we. We sit in our little cubicles, wearing
our pressed shirts and choking ties, and wondering why the heck
the company can’t splurge and get us real machines to work
on. We fire up our web browsers and check out Blue’s
News when we think no one is looking. Check out the heated
debate on sCary’s msgboard
if we have just a little bit more time before work needs to be
done. What’s the State of
the Wood? If we’re really daring, or perhaps sit in a
corner, we might even try to catch some screenshots from Diablo
II. Hot damn I can’t wait for that one. Maybe you’re
even as nifty as me and have a telnet IRC client running and while
you chat with friends. At lunch time it might actually be okay
to “run the ´net” so we do the same but more openly.
Me, I write stuff for upcoming issues of loonygames.
I’ve
often heard that you shouldn’t make a living out of something
you really love; that too much of a good thing sours you to it.
Well, damnit, let me give it a try and I’ll let you know.
In my opinion, if you sour to something you really love doing,
then you didn’t really love it in the first place. Or perhaps
you didn’t really understand in the first place the capacity
of what you wanted to do. But that’s my opinion. Feel free
to debate me on it.
I’m
not sure what kind of life a professional gamer leads. I mean,
to get good at a game, and I mean really, really good -- so good
in fact that you can beat everyone you come across, and you start
going out of your way to find people who might be able to beat
you -- what kind of life do you have? Do you play for 16 hours
a day? More? And do you focus your energy on just one game? Well,
I can’t think of any one game that I’d want to play
that much. That’s just crazy. I like lots of different games,
but they have a definite lifespan with me. They come, I play,
they go. Now and then I’ll pick up an old game that I haven’t
played recently, but that’s it. I tend to remember very quickly
why I got bored of it in the first place.
I’ve
often wondered what it would be like to a game tester. Actually
I’ve got somewhat of a QA background in software development,
I’m pretty sure I know exactly what goes on in testing games.
I think you’d get pretty damned tired of doing it unless
you really liked the game. And I’m picky, I’d only want
to test games I like. And who wouldn’t? I feel sorry for
the poor souls that game tested Trespasser.
So what’s
your dream job in the game industry? I’d actually like to
hear from people on this. And tell me why you think it’s
a dream job. In fact, if I get enough feedback, I’ll go off
and approach the type of people that hold your “dream position”
in the industry and get the beef on what it’s really like,
and compare it to what people thought it would be like. How cool
is that? You can mail me here: radpipe@loonygames.com.
-
Russell "RadPipe" Lauzon currently holds the world record
for using the word "exhumed" 15 times in a single sentence.
