It s All Worth It, Right?

It's All Worth It, Right?

There's something odd about human psychology. After a particularly scary or painful experience, some of us will say to ourselves, "Hey, that wasn't so bad. Let's do it again!" People that make games do this all the time. The job is incredibly difficult and can drive you completely mad. Your tools and supported operating systems change more often than you'd like, but less so than the game design. It seems that you delete more code than you write.

Taking three steps forward and five steps back is a good recipe for long hours, and you'll get an "all you can eat" buffet of overtime. It will get so bad that you'll feel guilty when you leave work before 7 p.m. on a Sunday night. When crunch mode is over, and you get back to a normal 60 hour work week, you'll wonder what to do with all the extra time on your hands.

Why bother? Looking at this description of the computer game industry is making that boring job at American General Life Insurance look pretty good. There are plenty of good things, but there's one that beats them all: After all the work, lost weekends, and screaming matches with producers and testers, your game finally appears on the retail shelves somewhere. A few weeks after it ships, you start looking. You make excuses to go to Wal-Mart, Circuit City, and Best Buy and wander the software section. Eventually you see it. Your game. In a box. On the shelf. Shrink-wrapped!

There's nothing like it. As you hold it in your hands someone walks up to you and says, "Hey, I was thinking of buying that game. Is it any good?" You smile and hand him the box, "Yeah, it's damn good."