It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: job (Page 6 of 7)

Day 26: self-evaluation

March 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I’m doing my annual self-evaluation for work today and it got me thinking about doing an overall self-evaluation.

So, here it is.  My self-evaluation for life.

Over the past year, I have continued to grow and learn as a human being while consistently delivering and executing on the tasks – both large and small – that have been assigned to me.  I have been the go-to guy when it comes to cleaning the cats’ litter box and successfully taken out the garbage week after week, sometimes even in the rain.

My biggest achievement this past year was, together with my wife, purchasing a house in October.  True – we had first undertaken this difficult task in the beginning of last year, but our final selection was a choice that to make both financial and emotional sense.  While I admit that we suffered a setback with the short sale earlier in the year, we could not be happier with the end result.

Likewise, in these harder financial times and especially with the added pressure of a mortgage, I have had to keep a firm eye on our bottom line.  As acting CFO of this household, I can confidently say that even with our property purchase, we still managed to make a small profit.  Our targets for next year may not be as aggressive, but I feel confident that we will continue to meet and even exceed our expectations in the years to come.

There is, as always, room for improvement.  I need to be a better listener, in two ways.  Sometimes, I can be so focused on certain tasks or activities that I tune other people out or only half-hear what they are saying.  I instead need to learn to actively multi-task or turn my undivided attention away from my current task (which can usually wait) and to the person speaking.  In addition, I need to actually act on certain requirements that would make our household cleaner and better overall.

Not tossing clothing on the floor, helping to clean up food and dishes, and clearly stating when I will be playing video games are all things that I intend to improve in the upcoming year.  Despite these small flaws, I believe that I continue to be a valuable asset and would love the time and patience to emerge as a future leader of this household.

Day 23: free time

March 6, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I get the weekend off, which probably sounds like a pretty odd statement.  Still, as our team is in the midst of deadlines, it’ll be a nice reprieve from the past few Saturdays when most of us have been in the office (and pretty busy).

Midst is a bit of a funny word to pronounce.

When I was a kid, free time seemed so great.  I waited until the weekend or for a day with a light amount of homework to get some precious free time.  It’d be a treat to have it – an ephemeral time when anything was possible.

Somewhere along the way, I became a lot more indecisive.  Now free time brings with it the impending question: what should I do?  And it’s not that I don’t have enough things to do.  It’s that I have too many.

That, combined with the fact that it’s harder to arrange activities with friends than it was in elementary school (when my parents would take care of all that!) means that I often don’t end up doing much.

There are video and board games I want to play, movies I want to see, skills I want to learn, places I want to eat at, TV I want to watch, and chores I should do.  Because there are so many things I can do, I usually end up taking the path of least resistance.  If I get in the car, I’ll have to make another decision – where to go? – so I end up usually sitting on the couch and watching something that I’ve recorded.  This doesn’t make me unhappy; after all, that was one of the things I wanted to do in the first place.

Still, it sometimes makes me feel defeated.  Don’t I have better things to do?  Shouldn’t I be practicing my new guitar or cleaning the litter box or making dinner or going out and discovering new places in our neighborhood?

So, I need to do two things.  First, I need to prevent myself from second-guessing my choices.  If I choose to order a pizza and watch the next cycle of America’s Next Top Model with Katie, I should enjoy it.  I should relish the terrible dialogue that comes out of Tyra’s mouth.

Second, I should take a page from what I do at work fairly often and make decisions.  I’ve made choices that impact millions of Sims players; I’m perfectly capable of deciding whether we eat dinner at home or out.

In other words, I gotta believe!

In myself.

Day 9: what makes video games fun? (part 1)

February 20, 2009 / / 1 Comment

I try to play many video games, both in sheer number and in a variety of different genres.  Part of this is in an attempt to become a better producer, but it’s mostly because I find it fun.

While I cannot play every game that comes out, the lending library that we have here at work, along with the company store and the occasional purchase means that I can get pretty good coverage of all the “major” games that get released (although the definition of major is heavily controlled by how much marketing a particular game receives).

This initial brief inspection of what – to me – is a good game focuses on one aspect of games: difficulty.  As I’ve grown older and my total free time has become narrowly defined by my working hours, I’ve started to appreciate more and more the shorter games with solid story and gameplay: the Portals, the Mirror’s Edges, the Dead Spaces.  That’s not to say I don’t get enjoyment out of an epic like Zelda or Fallout or GTA.  It’s just that the length, after the initial 15-20 hours, begins to feel like it’s working against me instead of for me.

Starting a long game isn’t the problem.  The problem is that with a long game, I’ll often reach a point where the difficulty of progressing is no longer worth the reward of what I’ll unlock.  There’s a very fine balance between making a game challenging and making a game hard.  I feel that many games fall into the trap of needing to ensure an experience that isn’t too easy and end up forgetting that difficulty requires fun gameplay to motivate the player to continue.

Maybe I’m bitter because I played Street Fighter IV for two hours last night and couldn’t defeat Arcade mode on Very Easy.  Maybe it’s because I remember exactly when I stopped playing GTA IV – a mission where I had to clear out an entire building full of drug dealers.  I did so and got a great feeling of accomplishment, only to be shot down by a police helicopter trying to escape and being reset to the beginning of the mission.  Maybe I just suck at games with “IV” in the title.

Regardless, it just felt like I was being needlessly punished by the game.  Why weren’t the GTA checkpoints in the mission closer together?  Why are the Very Easy fighters on Street Fighter still so good at fighting?  I should never have to say, “What?  Are you kidding me?” to my TV while playing in regards to failing.  I should only say things like “Oops.” or “Agh!  I can do this!” or “Wow, those 12 year olds are much better with sniper rifles than I am.”

It’s funny because The Sims series is the exact opposite of most games.  There is very little difficulty involved.  In fact, if you let your computer sit there, your Sims will generally do a decent job at taking care of themselves.  All our money cheats are right there in the readme and there’s no stigma to giving yourself a million dollars to build that ultimate mansion.  And yet, designers and producers on the team still talk about making sure that we’re not making things too hard or too easy – that we walk that fine line where players don’t feel like they’re watching the game play itself but also don’t feel inadequate because they’re not “good enough” to get past the first level (of a career or skill, for example).

And that’s a good thing.

Day 5: what i do at work (part 1)

February 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I do not get President’s day off, so I’ll be working today.  I worked a bit yesterday too, because our deadlines are getting close and there’s still much to do.  I don’t mind going overtime when I have to, if it means making a better game in the end, and despite the somewhat cyclical nature of stressful times, I really like my job.

But what do I really do?  Ask me when we first meet and I’ll tell you that I’m a “producer on the Sims 3” – but what does that really mean?  If you’re not in the game industry, it won’t be immediately clear and almost 2 years into the job, I’m still doing my best to put into words the actual responsibilities and day-to-day tasks I do.

In general, what is a producer?  A producer is…someone who makes sure stuff gets done?  Someone who attempts to keep in mind the big picture and overall quality of the product?  Someone who tells people what to do?  Someone who produces?

Those are all somewhat general and stereotypical answers that I’ve either spouted at one time or another or head other people say.  Like most generalizations, they’re not entirely accurate but tell a bit of the story.

For me, the best thing I can compare it to is directing a show in college.  A producer is a bit like a director, but (at my level, at least) with less power.  As a producer, you often get to see all the pieces of the puzzle that everyone else is making so you can ensure that they all fit together nicely.  Although very little of what I actually do (in a labor sense) ends up in the final game – much like when the curtain rises, the audience doesn’t see any of my work directly – a producer has a lasting and large influence of the overall way that a game is presented.

For example, let’s say you fire up a game for the first time and are presented with a menu screen.  You start a new game and get a short tutorial.  No, I didn’t make any of the art assets for that menu or tutorial, nor did I do the coding to make them behave like they do.  But a producer (probably in conjunction with a designer) ensured that the tutorial played well and taught you what you needed to know in the right amount of time.  We probably considered how the main menu would affect the flow of the start of the game.  We take the feedback from focus tests, the marketing department, and other members on the team and try to turn it into coherent and specific changes that improve the game.

In summary, a producer must – while working on bugs and spreadsheets and a bunch of little tasks – always keep their eye on the main goal: making the player happy while retaining the original intentions of the design of the game.

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