Copyright laws are a really important protection for people who make money off their creative work. If someone works as an artist of any kind, having other people make money off it or take credit unfairly can be really damaging. Essentially, it protects people from stealing their business without actually doing any work. However, this can limit artist's freedom, because they could infringe upon something by accident and get fined. It can make derivative works risky, because of the reason just mentioned. Personally, I wouldn't suggest a change to copyright laws, because it's a delicate business and I think it's good enough how it is.
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Mr. Dwan, a designer from Prologue Games, gave our class a presentation about his experience in the game design field.
Firstly, he talked about getting a job. He said that often you'll start as an intern for a gaming company. He mentioned that Prologue Games tries to give interns a learning experience, and that they don't take interns if they don't have time to really interact with them so it will be worth their time. He also stated that one of the most important things in getting a job in the gaming industry is a portfolio. Simply passing a college class isn't going to get you a job, you need evidence of what you specifically can and have done in order to get gaming companies to hire you. He also talked about what the job is like. Mr. Dwan is now a professional designer. He mentioned that many games, especially when made by smaller companies, don't sell well enough to make a lot of money, and said it could be months before a profit is made, if it happens at all. It's a career you should go into for passion and not for money, according to Mr. Dwan, and you may have to do other jobs on the side. This is especially true because job stability is very uncertain, and you don't always have another job in the industry to fall back on. He talked a lot about Knee Deep, an episodic pick-your-path game by Prologue Games. He said that when they were close to finishing a chapter, some of the team would split off and start working on the next chapter to reduce the time between releases. He also mentioned that due to the way the player's choices effect the story, there was the potential for too many paths to develop and the game to end up too short and underdeveloped. Apparently Prologue Games had this problem with a previous game. One of the strategies for reducing the number of paths, he said, is to have multiple options that lead to one end point, so the different possibilities don't get too chaotic. This talk made me wonder if I really want to look into a career in the game industry. The fact that it doesn't pay much and that you need a portfolio are my major concerns. I'm not sure what I want to do with my life yet, and if I have to have a portfolio then I'm going to have to put in a lot of time and energy, relatively soon, into something I'm unsure about. I'm also not sure I could do a job that's never really guaranteed. I don't know if I could do something out of passion that I'm not sure I have. All in all, I'm very uncertain about it. |
AuthorI'm moving on to my 4th (and final) year as a Game Art & Design student at Durham School of the Arts. I'd like to call myself an artist, but I'm a programmer at heart. Archives
February 2020
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