Writing about the Games Industry

I do love to write. I love to draw and to play games and cooking and eating, but oh, I also love writing. I can't say I've been writing as much as I wanted to, but to be fair, the only thing I have been actively doing for the past seven months has been eating. So It came as a surprise to me how driven I was from the Critical Studies latest task: an essay.

Two thousand words and we got to choose between a series of themes and I decided to go with

"Different development practices and business models exist between an Indie Games Studio and an AAA Gaming company. Examine and evaluate these differences". It wasn't much of a hard choice. I would love to write about narrative in games, of course, but I honestly think It's urgent for me to know the industry better. I worked at a Start-up for nine months and the truth is, I didn't know absolutely anything about the market, I got a job while completely clueless about what was it that I was doing: AAA? Indie? What the hell are these things? It took me awhile to familiarize with industry terms, but I still didn't know anything about how things worked. After I left my job to come to the UK and study Game Art, I started to reflect on my work and the reasons why our released game didn't work as expected. I did have some ideas before, but studying the business models and practices of big and small companies and how their games are so successfull would give me a better idea of what happened during Zeon.

I think I spent about four days researching and researching. I looked into blogs, news, articles, books, I was digging into everything I could find about the industry, and It came to a point where I could not turn my computer off because I had about 40 tabs open and I couldn't risk loosing them! I think the last time I went into a reading spree like this was about four years ago when I got into cyber activism. At the end my head was twisting and I couldn't look at my screen anymore, so I took a break.

Oh, the things I have learned with this project. I became so excited and so anxious with writing about my new discoveries that I didn't know where to start. I wrote down everything I wanted to write about (most of if is in Portuguese, though) and I highlighted the most important things. I had so many information in my mind that I was kinda scared of loosing track while writing, so I wanted to make sure I would be writing about the same theme all along.

After I was done with all the research, I felt like a goddess. I felt like I had all the knowledge I could have absorved from the mother internet and I was ready to write about it. It was a personal achievement being able to point, step by step, what went wrong with my project at work before. I knew exactly what we should have done and what we shouldn't. I identified all the small things we left behind and that could have make a huge different at the end, if we have chosen not to ignore them. Even though It was just a research, only a two thousand word essay, writing about the industry made me feel a lot more prepared to work in it. Not only I had a lot of information about how things actually worked, the process of making a game and the post-process of advertising and testing, I had a lot of data and numbers to justify all my statements, and It was great.

Finishing to write my essay left me with a taste of more. I wanted to do more research about other fields and explore the other themes I didn't choose to write about this time. I'll be posting my essay on the Hand-in page later, and maybe do a post-mortem after I receive the feedback for it.