Guy Munna
ACH 102
5/15/08
Gamming Lecture

On February 20th Brian Li gave a lecture to our ACH 102 class on the gaming industry. I found the lecture to be very interesting. The gaming industry is a multibillion dollar industry with multiple occupations available. Brian talked about what skills are necessary to perform these occupations and the salary received. Also he talked how to apply for one of these positions. The main jobs available in the gaming industry are game journalists, software engineers, artists, producers, game designer, and game testers.
A game designer designs the entire game. His job includes taking care of the story, game play elements, play style, genre, and mechanisms. The game designer has to have good people and team work skills because often they will work with other game designers, game artists, and game engineers to tie together all the aspects of the video game. Another skill that is necessary for a game designer occupation is creativity, to be able to come up with good game playing ideas, and to be able to convert those ideas into the video game world. Another skill needed for the job is to be resourceful. Game designers need to be able to create a fun game with the limited recourses that are available to them.
Game artist is another important job in the gaming industry. There can be 3d game artist or 2d game artists. Often times 3d game artists work on games for regular consoles like xbox, while 2d game artists create games for hand held consoles like game boy. The game artist creates the style of the game and the way game will look. A game artist must have good hand free sketch drawing skills, and must be familiar with several graphic software packages like photo shop, and 3d Studios max. They are in charge of creating world designs and the way the characters look. Team work if a must for a game artist because they have to work with game designers and engineers to make sure the artwork fits with the games.
A game tester is the most popular gaming occupation that pays the lowest. I think at one point in every one’s life they wish they could get paid for playing videos games. Although it sounds fun the job has long hours and can be very tedious. A game tester is supposed to play the video game for hours on end and look for any glitches or bugs in the program. They have to document everything that they find and report it back it the designers and the programmers. Game testers have to have a strong testing method and creativity to find glitches in the game and then know how to reproduce that same glitch so it can be fixed.
The lecture given by Brian Li on the gaming industry was very interesting to me. Although I have no desire to make a living in the world of video games I learned a lot. I never knew of the large opportunity of occupations that exist in the industry. Know when I play a video game I find it much more interesting because I know of the multiple steps it went threw to being produced. Each occupation in the gaming industry works efficiently with one another to put out a creative addicting game. There is a lot of work put into each game and I can appreciate the games I play more now.