The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student

Usually when one starts telling a story, one begins at the beginning. But I honestly don’t know where my beginning is. Does it begin with the first video game I played? With the long nights I spent with my mom, and later my friend Katie, playing video games until obnoxiously late at night? What about when I realized that RPGs came from Japan, and therefore decided that I would one day learn Japanese. Perhaps I should start with when I said to myself, “Of all the things I could do with my life, I want to make and design video games.”

Talking about making games

I had just recently arrived in Vancouver to begin studying at the University of British Columbia. I was taking first year programming, but my field of study was Japan. I had hoped to finally learn the language, but it wasn’t going so well. While my days were spent learning about the history of Asia, how to write simple programs in Scheme, and how I should have taken that no credit pre-cal class because the “college algebra” class I took in high school simply didn’t prepare me for calculus, my nights were spent as usual: on the computer or on my consoles playing games.

It was around this time that my cousin came back from Oregon after quitting Reed college because he hated it. Like me, he is a gamer. With no job and no classes, he had a lot of time on his hands. So we did the natural thing and started gaming together. But, being who we are, we didn’t just play the games, we analyzed them. We talked about everything from storylines to play dynamics, what we liked and what we didn’t. We brainstormed what game dynamics would have been good to have, and what we would do if we were to make a game. We had dreams of creating our own MMO. Or maybe it was just my dream and he was running with it because it was fun to talk about.

One of my strongest memories from that time is when he and I were at the game shop rattling off about some game or another and the guy behind the counter was like, “Are you two in the industry?” And we were like, “Uh… no?” Our answer clearly surprised him because, to him anyway, we sounded like professionals. I’m sure actual professionals would disagree, but it felt good to hear that. It felt empowering.

And so, I guess that it was around that time when I started thinking, “Maybe, just maybe, I could actually design games for a living.”

Breaking into the industry

Suffice it to say, I had no idea of how to realize my goal. If you aren’t a programmer or a graphic designer, there isn’t a whole lot out there on how to break into the industry.

The first thing people tend to say is, “beta tester”. Which would be fun for, oh, a whole five minutes. I want to be making the games, not combing them for bugs. And with no skills to speak of, getting promoted from that position is more of a gamble than I’m willing to risk.

There was always the option story creation, but after talking to some friends in the industry I found out the the requirements for being hired were either having a creative writing degree or being published. Since I wasn’t going to go back to school to get another degree, that left me with having to get a short story published. Yeah, the last short story I tried to right decided it wanted to be a novella, so you can see how well that option works.

Then I thought, “Well, I’m going to go to Japan anyway, so I figure I could always go for a translation job.” And it was with this casual thought in mind that I left to fulfill one of my other dreams: becoming fluent in Japanese.

To Japan!

It didn’t take me very long after coming to Japan to realize that getting a translation gig wasn’t going to work. For someone who wants to do translation, it’s possible. Hard as hell, but possible. Basically you study until you’re fluent enough to go to school in Japanese and then you go to one of the schools that specifically treat translating. You could probably also get by with the JLPT 1. Just to give you a frame of reference, though, I’ve been in Japan one and a half years now and, while I can get a solid pass on the JLPT 2 come December, there is no earthly way that I could get anywhere near a pass on the JLPT 1.

So when I was scouring the internet for any useful gamer colleges — in both English and Japanese — I came across this FAQ [Japanese only] and learned that I could, in fact study to be a game creator. Now, explaining what a creator was to my non-gamer Japanese teacher was a different issue (even when using the correct words for it). Since she had experience getting students into colleges and other technical schools, though, it all worked out. Mainly because she basically signed me up to get information from a broad range of schools, figuring that a few would stick.

For the next two months I went through pamphlets from three to five schools every day. Some of them were completely unrelated — like architecture schools — but almost all of the computer colleges had a video game section, and that section included studying to be a creator. In the end, there were about 20 schools that offered the specialization that I wanted. Weeding out the ones that didn’t look like they were good quality, I narrowed my choices down to five schools. After some more careful consideration, I settled on two prospects: Tokyo Net Wave and HAL. HAL won mainly because you can study for four years there instead of just two, it’s a bigger and better well-known school, and it has an Osaka branch (I’m not a huge fan of Tokyo).

End with the beginning

Perhaps here is where my beginning really is. Maybe all that I’ve written above is really my character’s backstory and from this point on is the start of the campaign. I do, in some ways, feel like a hero on a journey. I have a goal: study game design, and a destination: HAL. I will meet up and party with other heroes while on my journey, and if I don’t get schooled by any of the boss battles along the way, one day I’ll actually be designing games. Or maybe, like with most RPG plots, I’ll become a game designer and then life will say, “Please Insert Disc 2.”