Video Game Development Pros and Cons

Good news and bad news. If you read on, I will illustrate my point with a metaphor about kittens. But first an update.

I didn't get the 3D Artist Position at U of M. The bottom line was that they had a lot of applicants with actual paid experience on the job. My next application will be for a User Experience internship at JSTOR.

I really appreciate receiving a followup email from U of M 3D Lab. With over 150 applicants, that's a lot of work for them. They're even going to post (with permission) work from some of the applicants which will give us a sense of where to improve our skills.

The hope of defeating the tidal wave of competition in any branch of the entertainment industry seems more and more like an absurd folly. This Penny Arcade comic painfully illustrates the problems of oversupply of candidates. Conditions are grueling and projects are uninspiring, precisely because hundreds are lined up to replace you.

jer_ and his associates have been suggesting to me recently that I should consider joining the video game development program at U of M Dearborn. With my Motion Capture Animation certification, programming inclination, artistic skill, and obsession with board/card/puzzle games, it seems to them like a slam dunk.

They have a really good point. I have been mulling it over almost constantly.

On the debate podium opposite them are the articles I read almost monthly on Gamasutra.com or Hacker News, which make it seem that nearly everyone in the video game industry hates their jobs. Imagine you like kittehs and wish to work with them. But so does everyone else. The only remaining kitteh-related career is strapping kittehs into the Pain Machine from The Princess Bride. What do you do? I don't want to have to get up in the morning and go in to work on Railroad Tycoon 14, Tits 'n Guns 9, or the latest Wheel of Fortune.

Now we get to the good news. Independently-published video games are in a boom period, spurred by platforms like XBox Live, WiiWare, and iPhone or Android mobile devices. Minecraft is the poster child. Here is an excerpt from the article "Why Minecraft Matters":

Sounds interesting, you say, but why should I care that a few guys have put together a cool little indie game? The reason you should care is because a team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50 million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development. And it’s not just a fluke. The Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo, Braid, and a number of other extremely low-budget titles have electrified the gaming community, while games with millions in marketing budget like APB and Kane & Lynch fall flat on their face critically and commercially. Gamer discontent with these barren blockbusters is palpable, and Minecraft is the new poster boy for it.

The game isn’t technically finished; in fact it only recently left pre-beta state. It’s buggy, missing major features, and to make things brief, you kind of have to want it. But it also doesn’t have B-movie voice acting, a scruffy 30-ish white protagonist, DLC, a movie deal, console exclusivity, or any of the other hundred things that plague gamers in practically every major release.

Emphasis mine.

Using a Master's degree in game development to publish an independent video game has a pro and a con:
1. The con: If my goal is to impress myself when hiring myself in a job interview, it is unnecessary.
2. The pro: I might be able to develop the game during the course of the degree itself, rather than look for a source of funding for a startup.