The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student

If you’re dying to know what life at HAL is like and don’t want to wait the two months until I start there, you’re in luck! It turns out Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft tracked down Evan Shulgold — who currently attends the Nagoya branch of HAL — to talk to him about it. The article, Wanna Study Game Design in Japan? Here’s How, covers everything from classes to tips on what to do when you’re there.

Here’s an excerpt:

1. Japanese level
I’m actually pretty surprised about how simple the Japanese used in classes is. Like my teacher said, if you can have regular conversations with people, you’ll be OK. It depends on what you study, but obviously a lot of computer-related technical terms are katakana (words borrowed from English), so you likely won’t have any problems. On the entrance test, there were a few Japanese questions, but they were about level two or three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Not too difficult. There was also an interview. The questions weren’t too difficult, and were mostly things you’d be asked by the old drunk Japanese guy sitting next to you and your friends in an Izakaya. It seemed to be more about making sure I could keep up with conversation than actually screening my personality or anything.

Evan is actually a grad from my language school, The Yamasa Institute, and we were briefly acquainted with each other before he left to begin a glamorous life of learning video game programming. He’s the one who first mentioned HAL to me, which got me thinking more seriously about game design school in Japan. It sounds like his Japanese portion of the entrance exam was easier than mine, though; some of the kanji they wanted me to write wasn’t standard for JLPT 2. Differences in the branches of the school, I suppose (I didn’t have to take a math exam, ha ha).

Anyway, I’m glad to hear he’s doing well, and what he’s said about the classes goes a long way to reassure me about the environment.

From start to finish, applying for and getting into HAL was a nerve-wracking experience. Although I had applied to Yamasa without any outside help, that was in English and this was in Japanese. Not to mention that the Japanese way of doing applications slightly differs from the American and Canadian one.

I was lucky to have Yamaguchi-sensei, who was my main class teacher at the time, and Taniyama-sensei, a private lesson teacher who I do gaming-related classes with, to help me through. Without them I probably could have done it, but it would have been a lot worse of an experience.

In what follows below, I’ll be detailing the process of how I got into HAL, from the beginning up until I was told that I got in. (more…)