How to get into the game business

When I teach, on my mailing list (gameprogrammer.com), at parties... I get the question "how do you get into the game business" or "Will this class get me a job in the game business". They are pretty much the same question. The person asking the question wants to get a job working for a game developer/publisher and they want to know how to do it.

The second question, always asked by programming students is easy to answer: "maybe, but I hope not". One class in game programming is not sufficient to qualify you as a general purpose game developer. The first question has an answer that is so simple and obvious that no one ever believes me when I give the the answer. The answer is to write a game and sell it. It doesn't matter how you write it, and it doesn't matter how you sell it. Once you have done so you, working for yourself, are the president of a game company and are working in the game business.

The game business is extremely entrepreneurial. The only people I know who have spent 10+ years in the game business own their own businesses. Quite often they have gone from owning their own to working for others and back many times. Too many people seem to think that you can go to college, go to work for _____ (fill in the blank) and retire at age 65. That does not happen unless you own the company. You might be able to do that by getting a degree, learning COBOL, and going to work for AT&T maintaining their billing system, but do not count on it even there.

What you need to do is start writing games. Starting with games you can finish in a couple of weeks or at most a month.

Where do I get that advice? From my own career and from the history of Id. The Id folks started writing games
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software) for Softdisk. They had to produce a game a month and ship it. In my case I started out writing games in Basic on printing paper terminals back in the early '70s. I spent 20 years learning discrete event simulation, graphics, programming, and writing small games as a hobby before I got a job in the game industry. After I got sick of that I moved off and wound up spending 5 years doing corporate research on the games business and game's interaction with telecom before moving on from there.

If you don't want to be writing games enough to be writing games right now... do you really love it enough to be in the business?

If you wanted to be a kung fu master, you would practice every day of your life. Do you expect to do less to be a game development master? The words "Kung Fu" by the way mean something like "mastery developed by great effort over time". And, OBTW, recent scientific studies of the development of expertise indicates that it takes 10 years of daily
effort, daily effort, to become an expert at anything.

In brief, if you want to write games, then write games. If you want to be in the game business, be the game business.

Am I saying do it all on your own? Of course not. When you have a problem you can't solve look it up on the net, read a book, take a class, ask my list (gameprogrammer.com) :-) But, until you start, you will not know what questions to ask. Learning requires that you do it wrong, otherwise there is no learning. How many times will you jam your fingers before you learn to block a kick? Everyone who can block a kick has jammed a finger.

BTW, it really helps to give up on shame. It really helps to learn that you do not know *the* answer, just an answer. And, never, ever believe you are the expert. A beginner is always learning, I strive to always be beginning.