Last week's Aberrant Gamer column and some discussions here at SVGL were born out of impressions I'd gotten from female non-gamers when I tell them what I do. Because of my job, I end up mentioning games to the largely uninitiated quite a lot of the time, always to interesting results."Spitfire" is a game designer who runs the Game-ism blog, and he's been aiming to start a series of "What Do You Do?" articles wherein he asks writers and devs and other industry folks for stories about how "the rest of the world" responds to learning about our jobs, and whether they understand them or not, and how they do or don't judge. He decided to ask others about it after expressing frustration about the difficulty in discussing his work in games in social situations, and it's a frustration I know is shared by a lot of other industry folk. Since I was just on the topic last week, Spitfire was kind enough to invite me to be the first interviewee for the series.
As always when I'm interviewed about something, I ramble on at more length than is probably interesting to anyone about my sister, my UPS guy, and why I consider getting dreadlocks like N'Gai, but check it out if you like! Dude runs a cool blog, too.
4 comments:
I guess explaining that you write about games is tougher for people to get their heads around? My reply of "I design video games" is almost universally met with "cool!" by people under the age of forty. And maybe over forty for that matter, but I don't spend a lot of my time getting asked that question by people in that age bracket.
Illuminating stuff. The interview reads like a book proposal.
The worst part for me is the NDA. Before a project is announced conversations usually go like this:
Someone: What do you do?
Me: I'm a computer games programmer.
Someone: Oh, what game are you working on?
Me: I can't tell you.
*Uncomfortable silence*
I feel like a bit of a twit trying to explain to people that what I'm working on is "a big secret", because it seems so stupid.
It's nice to see that your uncle cheered you on as well. ^^
I think being a game journalist does make it much more difficult to explain than a programmer. I think your explanation, both long and short, are sufficient for waht you need to say, though.
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