Games are strange. Sometimes designers worry too much about the story and have crappy gameplay. Or they have great graphics and crappy gameplay. Sometimes having too many or the wrong controls can kill a game. Sometimes simple and easy to learn can be the one that gets popular.

I would not touch game design with a 10 foot pole. Tons of people wanting to do it, means over saturation of the market. You will work long hours, with crappy pay, and generally start to hate your life. There is an extremely high burn out rate among people that go into it.

Going to school to become a real developer will get you much more money, and a much better work environment.

Apparently the unemployment rate for game designers is 4% and 40 hours a week at average of 27 bucks an hr.

Real developer? Like software developer?

I feel like that 4% number is misleading.

My suspicion is that only 4% of the people who were laid off from developing games are waiting for another games job to pop up. If they get another job making other apps or even waiting tables they aren't listed in the unemployent numbers for game developers are they?

Software developer on topic.. i've never done coding. I'm guessing that field would be quite rough to start out in?

They are lying to you. Yes a real developer like software developer.

Game industry coding is done because you love it, not because it's a rational decision. EA is a sweatshop. With a smaller developer you may have a better work environment but you should still want to live there.

The thing is i've had fun messing around with code in winamp and shit but i never understood it since i never learned it. Thats my main worry. I got up to calc 3 and physics 2 for engineering but i'm not sure how useful that would be for software development.

Hows the school like? Lots of homework or what?

What do you want to code? "game coding" covers just about everything under the sun, depending on the game. Graphics engine development? Physics coder? Skeleton rigger? Backend network infrastructure? Security? AI? UI? Artist tool support?

Have you watched any of the Star Citizen development videos? Take a look a their bugsmashers episodes. In that particular case it's all XML.

That's one of the key problems with all labor statistics- the definition of the labor pool is pretty vague.

Let's say that the country consists of 100 able-bodied adults. If 50 of them have jobs, and 50 don't what's the unemployment rate?

On the one hand, it's 50%.

On the other hand, it's 5%.

How is it 5%? Because only 5 of the people who don't have jobs are looking for jobs. The other 45 of them have either given up looking for work, or have started hawking health shakes and cosmetic products on facebook and thus consider themselves to be "self-employed," etc.

And yes, it gets even hazier when you start asking about whether a person is employed in their chosen field or not. There are a hell of a lot of people with college degrees working hourly in retail / food service / entertainment because they can't actually find work in the field for which they studied.

Is a person with a law degree unemployed if she's working as a waitress or answering phones at a bank?

Only coding I can do is on an Enigma.

Shall we send Simon Wiesenthal your way?

If a person with a law degree is working as a waitress, then the country is better off. We have too many lawyers as it is.

--Ian

I agree. And not from a "whine, we have too many lawyers" standpoint, but from a "The reason I dropped out of law school is that I didn't really realize until after I'd started that we do, in fact, have way too many lawyers, in that there are literally tens of thousands more law school graduates than jobs, something like 40% of all law school grads are unable to find work in a field which requires bar-passage within 12 months of graduation, and salaries are generally in the shitter for anyone not working an upper-level position in biglaw."

But the important question is what does that do to employment numbers? How do you count a person with a doctorate degree who is working at Best Buy? We use the term "under-employed" a lot, but there's no official metric for it. So these people don't count against the unemployment number.

Neither do people who, for whatever reason, have given up trying to look for work at all. They're not "unemployed" because they don't even count as part of the labor force.


So, yeah- I can see 4% unemployment among game developers... after you exclude all the people who studied something related to game development, but wound up taking work in a different field because they discover that finding a decent job in game development is hard.

What about the guy I know with a law degree who's designing levels for CRPGs? :)

But yeah, unemployment is something that is fundamentally unmeasurable, because it's not a single number. You can't really divide the currently-not-employed population into "people looking for work" and "people not looking for work" because almost everyone who is "not looking for work" would take a job if one were available that offered them enough money/flexibility/enjoyment/etc, and almost everyone who is "looking for work" has bypassed at least one possible job because it's offering too little money for too much work (picking lettuce for $8/day, let's say).

So "unemployment" is not a single number, it's a complex set of overlapping value preferences.

--Ian

I wish you could. He is one of my heroes, but he died about 10 years ago.

Well as i said i've never coded stuff. Winamp visualizations is the most i've done. Thats why i'm here trying to get more information.
THe main thing i've done is make 3d stuff and play with poly designers such as zmodeler. Thats why i thought game design would be a good choice.

paging @asmasm. He does video game graphic design. Seems to like his job and do well.

Learning the coding languages takes some time, but it is a skill that can be learned.

Being able to conceptualize what you want a computer to do in a way that the computer understands what you are telling it is the real talent - unfortunately, for those in the programming industry, this talent is not limited to a small fraction of the workforce.

I'd recommend instead of trying to get into programming games, try to get into computer/software integrations - that is to say, don't focus on ways that we can interact with computers, but rather think of ways in which computers can interact with us.