So there’s been a lot of silence here the past few weeks…or rather, I should say month. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the fact that Nier and Lost Odyssey are relatively long games to complete. It also doesn’t help that I wasn’t much impressed with Black Ops, but I haven’t reviewed it yet because I didn’t get the chance to finish it before the copy was taken away.
 
Sometimes I feel as if I should try and stand for some sort of professional ethics, but let’s face it. This is a gamer blog, and while I try to actually improve the state of modern games journalism, it is not my profession and t his is no site of a professional. Oddly enough, however, I’ve moved on to a career that I wouldn’t have expected of myself. All this time I’ve been looking to become a front-end web developer, and suddenly I find myself using JavaScript to program test simulations.
 
In other words, I’m technically employed in the Serious Games industry.
 
The experience has been a fascinating one. On the one hand, I’ve always thought object oriented programming wasn’t my shtick, that it was too mathematically and logically focused for me to wrap my head around. I was born an artist, and despite my education it is an artist I remain. Yet here I am, doing pretty damn well at my job so far, and it has already inspired my own thoughts into how I could begin making my own games. Whether I have the time for such a thing I don’t know. I’d love to dedicate some time to building games, but I also want to play and analyze games as they release.
 
I imagine this is where most game developers are forced to make a choice. Sacrifice their gaming time to build a game of their own, or try and compromise? Or maybe forego games programming altogether. We’ll see which choice I make after the Holidays. Wait, no, Dead Space 2 comes out in January…and I need to catch up to Dead Rising 2, Fable 3, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and so many more…
 
Well, eventually I’ll reach a point where I’m ready to make a choice.
 
Anyway, this post and my new found job actually have a point for you. My experience in Human Factors and Usabil ity is enough for me to acknowledge that it is an area hurting in the games industry. My experience has not, however, prepared me for the frustrating process of debugging, which I’ve had to do plenty of these past couple of weeks. In fact, I’m about to jump into someone else’s program to start doing some testing and bug reporting for them, which they will then have to go replicate and figure out the cause of.
 
The idea of “trying to break” a program or simulation seems so easy at first. Just do unexpected things. Yet the only thing that comes to mind to the programmer is to make sure the logic they just wrote works as it should. If user requires object A to be in State Y before object B can change to State Z, then they will test B when A is not in State Y and test B when it is. They may even mess around with some other objects and states, but nex t thing you know something happens that throws object B into state XYZ when object D is first created. What? Why is that happening? Did I program that? Why are the two even interacting?
 
It has been a bit of a humbling experience for me as my own programs are nowhere near complex as those of the modern video game, and if I were to start a project tomorrow it would be no better than what people were programming back on Commodore’s and Apple IIe’s back in the 80’s. This is a complex industry, and it has taken me a week and a half to finish something that, yeah, it’s complex enough, but …well, for me to give an appropriate idea I’d have to describe my work to you, and unfortunately it is classified. Just trust me when I say this stuff is complicated, and just to get something simple done can require as much as 80 hours of work.
 

At the same time, I feel that working no more than 40 hours a week has kept me sane, and allowed me to look at problems with fresh eyes after some time off and a good night of sleep. Yet the modern games industry is built on overtime and stress just to meet a deadline. Building such complex systems in a time of two years is asking for trouble.
 
I will likely continue to keep my critical eye of games, and though I feel more sympathy for the programmers I’ve only grown greater ire towards another. Publishers aren’t just encouraging crap material by forcing their studios to build one imitation after the next, they are forcing schedules that result in shoddy material produced by exhausted employees running on little sleep and tons of caffeine or energy drinks. If the slave drivers would relax and people would stop rushing product I guarantee you that, even if all the games were imitations, the y’d at least be designed and run a lot better, even if it took them longer to come out.
 
Good things come to those who wait, after all.