A note on applying to jobs in the video game industry...

Literally every day of my life I'm stopped in the street by some college kid looking for tips on how to "break in" to gaming. Usually, I just hand them the squeegee and spray bottle I carry with me and have them clean my car before I answer, but today is 10/02, so I'm going to share my wisdom of nuggets with you without requiring the manual labor.

A lot of resumes cross my desk and a lot of candidates come in for interviews...here's some good tips that will get you hired every time:

• Always apply for whatever position is available. Just graduated from school with an English degree? Go ahead and apply for that senior online programmer with 10 years of experience position.
  
• Always go ahead and let us know that what you really want to do is design games, regardless of whether or not we are hiring for a designer position. Designer jobs are easy to come by...every game company has openings for people who we want to pay huge salaries to sit around and think of a "cool idea" for a game. There is no shortage of skilled people to fill hard roles like programming and art...finding someone who can say "wouldn't it be cool to make a game like World of Warcraft" is virtually impossible.
• Always write your resume in a non-standard font. Please. If I don't have to go to Adobe.com and pay $40 to download your font I probably won't read your resume.
• Never dress appropriately for the interview. We're a bunch of game developers...we wear jeans and t-shirts all day long. The last thing I want to know is that you care so much about getting this job that you are willing to iron your one dress shirt to make a good impression. You are a special rock-star, better than our best, and you should let us know this by rolling out of bed in whatever you slept in the night before and stumbling into my office.
• Never let on that you actually want the job. Nothing will hurt your negotiating position more that letting us know that you actually want the job you are applying for. Please make sure you seem disinterested the entire interview. Don't make eye contact. Don't talk about games. Don't seem passionate.
• Always answer the question "what do you do for fun" by stating that you do whatever job you are applying for in your free time. So, if you are applying to a programming position, say that you only program in your free time. The last thing I'm looking for when I ask this question is any insight into what you might be like as a human being and what it might be like to...I don't know...spend 40+ hours a week in constant interaction with you.
  
• Whenever I ask the question "Do you have any questions", always respond with "no." I'm definitely looking for employees who aren't inquisitive about the position or the company.
• Always liberally insert anti-Semitic or anti-American comments throughout the day.
• Never show up on time. You don't want to appear needy. A good rule of thumb is that if you are scheduled for a 10:00am interview, don't show up until around lunchtime. REFUSE to address the fact that you are late.
• Whenever you are asked to solve a problem on the board, instead decide to draw a cute picture of your private parts or a graffiti tag with lots of "swears" in it. Also, please take a long time to actually draw the aforementioned item, because the last thing I want is to see that you are able to think quickly on your feet. After I ask the question, go to the restroom, read the paper, grab some coffee, and only then should you draw your "junk" on the white board.
• Always comment about how much the games we have made in the past "suck." Please point out your detailed knowledge of every glitch, bug or poor implementation of gameplay we've ever done. DEMAND that we fire everyone involved with the last title because they were clearly raised by illiterate, diseased primates.

Using these tips you should land your dream job in no time! Good luck and hope to see you soon.

Happy Jimday – 10/01/2009

October is upon us!


For those of you who are unaware, 10/01 is the historic holiday known as "JimDay." You see, there is a guy on our team who I'll call Jim, because his name is Jim. In honor of this (and the fact that Jim does awesome work), we have declared today to be Jimday and threw him a party to celebrate. No, it was not Jim's birthday, nor was there any special reason to hold JimDay today...other than the fact that it was October First, which totally made sense. Please, please, please write your Congressperson and ask, nay demand, that this be a federally recognized holiday.

First, as is traditional on "JimDay", here is the JimDay card:

JimDay Card


















Of course, people literally lined up to sign the card for this historic Jimday:

Feel the love! (Last name deleted)












Sure, a card is nice...but what about serious party decorations?

Amazing!















Let's look at the detail-work on the banner, shall we?
















Since you haven't written your state representative yet, we couldn't find any "Happy JimDay" banners at the store, and had to go with "Happy Birthday." Luckily, with our amazing programmer art skills, we managed to seamlessly cover this fact...

How about refreshments? It isn't JimDay without food is it? Of course not! We decided to go with an assortment of cheesecake, which as served on amazing zoopals plates. These plates are shaped like animal heads. This was paired with Zoopal animal-shaped utensils and Zoopal sippy cups. Please go buy a gross of Zoopal goods at your local store now, because now that I know they exist, the idea of a Zoopal-less world leaves me feeling empty inside.


JimDay Cake! Notice the "frog" Zoopal plate in the upper left hand corner.













In honor of JimDay, we presented Jim with crucial gift certificates redeemable from his co-workers to help him get through the day:


And finally, what you've all been waiting for...a blurry IPhone picture of a small sub-portion of the festivities!
















In summation, Jim is a guy, and therefore we had JimDay. Also, Cake.

OctoJabroni Kick-Off and Meet the Author Signing Event!

I can think of no better way to kick-off OctoJabroni AND to rekindle my love affair with actor's named "Woody" than to see Zombieland on opening night.













http://www.zombieland.com/

As an added bonus, this will be your first chance to meet the author and get him to sign whatever you are interested in him signing. Burt Reynolds picture? I'll sign it! Blank piece of paper? Consider it signed! Your favorite boxers? Already signed!

So...the details are as follows:

The film: Zombieland.
Location: Some movie theater that is playing Zombieland in the greater Chicago area.
Time: Sometime Friday night. Possibly a matinee on Saturday if I'm sleepy.

So, basically, if you happen to be seeing Zombieland at the same time and location I eventually decide to see it at, I will most likely not ignore your presence, and if you stick a pen in one of my hands and something to sign in the other, I'll probably scribble some nasty comment on the item.

Hope to see you there!

And So It Begins...

According to Science, there is literally nothing more pointless in this Universe than social networking. In fact, our learned founding father's noted this in the Constitution:

Social...site...s...destroy...the...core...of...our...nation.

Powerful stuff, no? Of course, these specific words and their placement happen to be throughout the document, but the fact of the matter is that those words ARE there, and the framers did in fact choose to use them in a fashion that allows me to randomly select them.


So, faithful readers of this blog from thebeginning, you must be asking yourself why I, a man of great taste and adequate personal hygiene, would choose to ignore both Science and several deceased men whom I've never met and chose to embrace social networking.

The answer to this question is convoluted and irrational, but also tinged with a delicate smoky flavor:

• People, who may or may not be exclusively limited to my mother, are constantly asking me for updates on my life. Can you blame them? I mean, I am constantly doing _things_. On any given day I may or may not wake up. I may or may not go to work. I may or may not watch something on television. Now, I may or may not write a blog post. The list of tedious, mind-numbing things I may or may not do is endless. Who _wuldn't_ want to read a detail description of some of these things I may or may not chose to share.

• The kids seem to like the facebook and twitter. The average age of my colleagues in games seems to be right in that sweet spot where they actually understand social networking and its apparent vital nature to modern society. As someone who will soon be celebrating my 29th birthday for the xth consecutive year, I'm definitely feeling the peer pressure to join this "revolution." I am, shall we say, concerned, given that the last revolution I took part in was centered around Crystal Sodas (and we all know that one set us back about 10 years). Despite these huge risks, none can argue that peer pressure is an important aspect of my life, so...full steam ahead.

"But", you collectively say, "what will you be blogging in regards to, dear sir?" Well, my intrepid reader, that is an excellent question. At the moment, I'm treating this as a social experiment just to discover what one is supposed to blog about...at the moment I have literally no idea.

My work, which is the stuff anyone in their right mind would actually be interested in, is largely covered under NDA. Then it hit me...OCTOBER! That's right, ladies and gentleman, I shall be blogging my October. Not my "day to day", of course, but literally things of and related to my life as they pertain to the general creamy goodness that is the month of October. To quote the author of this blog in real time, "If only everyone could blog about their October-related experiences during the month of October, then there would be a lot of blogs about people's October-related experiences."

Fin.