Last Friday, we had Joe Hallock, a principal design director at Microsoft, speak with us. He also brought along two people from his team to share their experiences entering the field of UX and product design.
Joe spoke about the types of work we might encounter when we enter our careers, and illustrated that on a graph.
My career aspirations and interests change like the weather, but right now, I am interested in working in the gaming industry. With companies like Valve, Xbox and Oculus having already set up a solid base in the Seattle area, and companies like Riot Games recently opening up offices here, it’s an exciting time for the games industry in Washington. Video games was placed at the cross-section of Broad Audience and High Information Density on Joe’s graphs. This means that the work done is meant to reach a broad audience, and is packed with information, assets, design work and etc. Video games take a lot of work specificially because they are meant to reach as many people as possible.
After some research, I think I’d like to work on visual design for video games, and eventually transition to UX/UI for games if that becomes a possibility.
A negative of the gaming industry that I’ve read about many times, is a concept called crunch. Crunch is a term in the gaming industry that refers to mandatory overtime and overwork associated with the development and launch of a game. Due to tight schedules, and specific windows of time where it is best to market games to consumers, crunch culture was born. I believe it could even be worse nowadays, since games constantly push out updates, DLC and new content in short periods of time. In the past, games would be released and that would be it, until the next game in the series was released.
While this concept is a bit frightening to me, reading about efforts and initiatives to improve work-life balance and reduce crunch make me optimistic.
A positive of working in this sphere is working on things I actually enjoy. I have been a gamer for most of my life, and to be apart of a thing I adore would be fulfilling for me.
During my time in this program, I’ll probably pick another career path, but right now my interests lie in this field.