Monday, October 6, 2008

So You Wanna Be a Game Designer

So you wanna be a Game Designer, huh?

Well, the first thing you need to do is forget all that crap about making games and listen to me.

Yah, if you really wanna be a game designer, you should forget all about games, and go into Advertising, instead.

Yah man, Advertising is basically movie-making for folks with super short attention spans, right?

I mean, wtf could be better than sitting around with a bunch of dopes and thinking up dumb little movies that'll catch folks off guard?

Why in the nine hells would you even wanna monkey around with a bunch of miserable underpaid nerds on four years of math problems to create some humongously outdated piece of crap that nobody but a masochist like you would enjoy anyways?

When you could be using a fraction of that time and energy creating ten zillion million-dollar thirty-second gags and come out looking like a cool guy surrounded by swimsuit models?

And look at some of these commercials out there, man, they're just terrible.

And I don't mean Eagle Man terrible in a good way, either, I'm talking about Pictures of Guys In Their Underpants in the Newspaper terrible.

"Hey, now this is a nice little number!"

"Can I have the ones off the model?"

"Oh man they're still warm!"

Its like, oh gawd, here we go again with the split screen and the two kinds of deodorant leaving streaks, or the napkins sucking it up, they're pouring some blue stuff on a maxipad, here's some cheerful music and an over-medicated looking mom making paper-bag lunches, a still picture of a vacuum cleaner and a corporate symbol and some smiling guy in a refrigerator repairman suit, another spritzing can of sweaty pop, a beer and a palm tree on a beach, a chewing gum commercial on a beach (talk about the worst combo ever, sand and gum, awhellyah, crunch-crunch-crunch, that's the mental association you wanna shoot for ahaha), a chick in a white dress floating across a field of golden grass near the sea while a voice-over does the ten million side-effect warnings in a soothing voice, man, those're just brilliant.

I sit there and think, "man, how can anybody think up anything this terrible? Its almost impossible to make anything lamer than that if you were trying to do it on purpose, y'know? I mean, if you knew how to do something that boring on purpose, you could go around using your super boring powers to turn people's brains off and temporarily turn them into zombies, you could use that Friendly Maytag Repairman and Choosy Moms Choose Jif Peanut Butter garbage to make people blank out completely or at least turn away from you so you could rob banks while they weren't looking or something!"

And then you got all the good ones, y'know, and man, I wish some of those guys made feature length films, like that Geico thing, with the Cavemen (not that stupid-ass lizard one, goddam), even though some of those suck, or the ones with the Snickers guys in the costumes, I mean, seriously, that would beat the living shit out of any of the ten million SNL-guy and "coming of age" generic comedy formula movies.

Not that I think you oughta try to do good commercials, y'know, I think its better to not have to try so hard and just make tons of the crappy ones with the split-screen deodorant trials and stuff.

Plus you won't piss the other advertising guys off by raising the bar or anything, everybody can make their money and get the hell out of there for the weekend, easy peasy.

And that's what you should really do, if you wanna be a Game Designer, you should wanna be something else, instead, besides that, basically, anything but that.

Now, if you've accidentally become a Game Designer, then that's a whole different problem, you couldn't help it, you were forced to wear weird costumes and locked up in a basement or whatever, its not your fault.

2 comments:

W.Churchill said...

Richard Garriott is orbiting the earth RIGHT NOW

W.Churchill said...

yeah man you gotta wonder about those advertising people. I mean that would seem like a pretty fun job.

I mean what. You sit around a table for a few weeks writing on post-it note until you cover one wall of the office. Then you go through and pick the best one and try to come up with different ideas.

All the while that huge pile of sacks full of cash sit in the corner where everyone can see them so it motivates them and stuff. Hell it would motivate my ass. Then you grab what you need to make the commercial and the rest gets divided between the team, based on seniority of course.

But I like to punish myself, so it looks like Im sticking with the game thing for now. Hell just being some lowly little artiest guy making models working long hours in a dark room and getting paid to do it works for me.

But hell man maybe we could start an advertising studio and make perfume, ketchup, douche and apple juice commercials for a living. I wouldn't pass on that opportunity as long as I could get a corner office with a mini bar.