hey guys, not to put a dent in the topics but, i live in Texas and my brains about to explode thinking about which school i want to transfer too... i doubt yall do, but if any of you guys know of any schools that offer journalism and game design, please let me know!!! oooorrrrrrrr I want to do something with writing and video games and i keep getting the run-around. I just want to know what opportunities there are out there for a guy like me. Thanks for yall's time.

well rest assured you won't get a job in writing video games if you don't know the basics of actually coding them. BUT, you live in texas, and god knows there's a lot of IT oppertunities down there

Quote: Original post by TheKrust
well rest assured you won't get a job in writing video games if you don't know the basics of actually coding them.

WTH are you talking about? Fully 100% of the writers i've seen work on the 10 or so AAA titles in my studio couldn't tell you what binary is, let alone write a single line of code. Nowadays many studios are hiring hollywood writers to help flush out the stories for games; their background: writing & literature. Many of them don't even play games; they're just (sometimes) amazing at cohering a story.

To the OP. There are tons of "real" schools now offering gamedev majors. Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, USC off the top of my head. More all the time. The new programs most significantly offer a network of connections to help get your foot in the door.

Taking an actual "game design" or "game oriented" major is still really really cutting edge and outside of a couple programs not often highly regarded.

The best route to programming is still a CS major from an actual college. The best route to design is still having a portfolio of mod maps under your belt and a willingness to work for pennies. The best route to writing is still packing your bags, moving to hollywood, waiting tables, writing a bunch of scripts, getting an agent and spamming the crap out of the major studios (writing is and always will be one of the hardest positions to land simply because there are so many thousands of talented writers trying to break in along side you)

-me

Quote: Original post by Palidine
WTH are you talking about? Fully 100% of the writers i've seen work on the 10 or so AAA titles in my studio couldn't tell you what binary is, let alone write a single line of code.

That's very odd because I;ve read about 15 or so books that all talk about how hard it is to get into the game design / writing industry if you do not know any technical aspects. Now there's a difference here, and also a question for the OP, "are you talking about game writing, or game design?"

Many people quite carelessly fuse the two words together. Game writing, yes, you would probably not need to know nearly as much technology, but the down side to that is, you have much less of a chance of getting your own game idea into the industry mainstream. Mainly because, at least from my experience, countless people just demand games that are impossible to make with our current technology. Belive me, people know I can make games and I;ve gotten some pretty absurd ideas thrown at me. The other part is, most storys and ideas for games come internally from the people that the producers know and trust. Occasionaly, they will go out on a limb and hire someone new, but the chances of that being you (statisticly speaking) are worse than winning the lottery.

Quote: Original post by Palidine
(writing is and always will be one of the hardest positions to land simply because there are so many thousands of talented writers trying to break in along side you)

exactly... I'm not saying it's impossible, but I wouldn't count on it being my future.

Quote: Original post by Palidine
The best route to design is still having a portfolio of mod maps under your belt and a willingness to work for pennies. The best route to writing is still packing your bags, moving to hollywood, waiting tables, writing a bunch of scripts, getting an agent and spamming the crap out of the major studios

.... yeah that sounds like fun.... but maybe instead you can just spend a year or two and become a moderate programmer. Thereby making it very easy for you to get a software related job (which can often pay bank), and smoothly progress to your passions. Programmers are few and far between. If you make yourself a diamond amongst a big pit of coal, you won't have to search for oppertunities, they search for you.

Quote: Original post by TheKrust
That's very odd because I;ve read about 15 or so books that all talk about how hard it is to get into the game design / writing industry if you do not know any technical aspects.

And that, my friend, is the difference between reading books about the industry and actually working in the industry. [smile] Now it could be that because I work at a big publisher, the field is different, but I also have a few friends who are writers for games (not at my company) and neither they nor the writers at my company know anything about the technical aspects of games. And when I say nothing i mean literally nothing; heck, a lot of the artists on our game don't know anything about the technical aspects of the game (they just make pretty pictures that are smaller than some pre-defined limit; it'd help if they knew details but it doesn't really hurt them to not know)

Writing and design are 2 completely different beasts. The OP is talking about writing (from a PM he sent me quoted in a second).

Writing in games also has absolutely nothing to do with getting game ideas into the industry. Game writing is about cohering a fiction around a game idea that someone else came up with. i.e.:

Designer "i want to make a sci-fi FPS game with such and such mechanics".
Writer: "ok. what if there were these big rings in space created by an ancient race of aliens. humans and contemporary aliens are fighting over these rings and earth has become the battlefield".

[EDIT: another example. my team just hired a writer for AI dialog. i.e. their entire job is to write little lines of dialog so the AI doesn't sound retarded when it says stuff]

i.e. the designer has loose sketches of gameplay & mechanics and maybe some story elements. the writer is what makes it a story arc like halo. Basically tying the levels together so that the player feels part of a story instead of just an instrument of destruction.

That's how writers are used nowadays anyway. As the industry has matured it has realized the importance of coherent story and has brought in specialists to craft that piece of the puzzle. Historically, that story would be under the purview of designers and producers. This is perhaps the discrepancy between your books and my reality.

Quote: Original post by bmrugen
What if I want to write for gaming magazine, online site, or like a gaming tv station? Any suggestions? I appreciate the feedback!

I think your idea of a journalism degree is a good one. I don't know much about the particulars of a writing career arc. I'd imagine that it would be something like:

1) get journalism degree
2) apply to gaming / site / tv companies with writing samples (write some game reviews, industry reports, etc)
3) ??
4) Profit

A good starting place would be to look for posted job openings at the places for whom you'd like to work and see what they require.

[EDIT: also, there's zero benefit to being a programmer if you want to be a writer. why would you waste time doing something you don't want to do? sure it can get you in the door but it'd take 3-4 years to train yourself to be good enough programmer to get that first job; in the meantime you could have already started your career as a writer. There's a great quote i'll paraphrase that some professor said in a lecture I saw once: "rules and barriers are there to stop the other guy". Just because some guy in a book said programming is the best route to the game industry doesn't mean it's the only route; if you want something go take exactly what you want don't take some crazy circuitous route to get there]

-me

Quote: Original post by Palidine
sure it can get you in the door but it'd take 3-4 years to train yourself to be good enough programmer to get that first job

so I guess if a guy wanted to be a doctor... why waste 6 or 8 years in med school when he can just move next to a hospital and spam the crap out of the HR department with applications? I mean, they're bound to take one of them!

Look, all I'm saying is, doesn't it seem like a big chunk of common sense that if you want a job that involves technology, it maybe, just maybe, might be a good idea to get familiar with technology.

Btw, books don't write themselves. People who have been in the feild for a long ass time do. Maybe if one or two people told you it mattered, that might be questionable, but when all the authors seem to be in agreement, it tends to raise a few questions.

Now if you're talking about a HUGE company that practicly has a sweatshop for their writers, then yes, maybe you don't need any tech experience. But it seems like trying to squeeze in between thousands of writers might not be the most time (god forbid luck) effective way to go. And when you get into those places, it may very well be impossible to get your ideas into the game without them being distorted beyond recognition. Not a very rewarding experience in my opinion.