Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2009 - (Page 34)

exploring career options Video Game Programmer Soren Johnson Soren Johnson is almost nostalgic about the Commodore 64 his family got when he was a kid. “Back then,” he says, “when you booted up a computer, it dropped you into a programming language. You would turn it on and see a blinking cursor, and you’d just start typing in BASIC programs.” And program he did, creating games of his own throughout middle and high school. But it wasn’t until after earning a B.A. in history and working toward his master’s in computer science that his career path became clear. After interning at video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA), Soren went on to work at Firaxis on Civilization III and Civilization IV. In 2007, he returned to EA to work on Spore, a game he thinks represents a new direction in the industry. I’ve seen you referred to as a game developer, a game designer, and a programmer. What’s the difference? On Civ IV, I was the lead designer. I decided what all the units were, how the combat was going to work, what the technologies were—all the stuff that goes into the game. I collaborated with other people, but I was making the final decisions. But I was also a programmer, which meant I was implementing those decisions. And I think that’s a very efficient way to work. If you think of an idea and you can implement it yourself, you’re going twice as fast as a designer who comes up with an idea and has to take it to the programmer and then keep going back and forth. But everyone who works on a game is a game developer, whether you’re an artist, designer, programmer, writer, or even the sound guy. You left Firaxis to work on Spore. Why did you want to work on this game? The Spore team is really thinking differently about the relationship between the game 4 imagine What game programmers do In a nutshell, game programmers write the code that makes gameplay possible. Depending on the company and the game, programmers can play an important role in the game design as well. Where they work Most work for video game publishers (like Electronic Arts or Activision), but many create games independently. Soren points to Jonathan Blow’s Braid and Jonathan Mak’s Everyday Shooter as examples of successful independent games. player and the game developers. Spore is built to let people design things and share them with each other. When you’re playing a game of Spore, you start developing this little creature. You have an editor that lets you add arms and legs and eyes and adjust things and change the color and shape. And the code figures out how that creature should walk and attack and sing and do all sorts of cool stuff. Since all these creatures people make are built from the same building blocks, we can compress them into very small files and share them from game to game. So when you play your game, your friend’s creature might pop up and you can play against them. I think this will be an interesting new branch of development in the future, which no longer assumes that game designers are the only ones who know how to make games or art or anything else. There is an incredible amount of creativity out in the world just waiting to be tapped into, and video games should take that into consideration. That was my belief with Civ IV. Instead of giving people in-game editors, we gave them really powerful tools outside the game to create interesting mods and scenarios for Civ IV. We know that fans can put as much energy and time into making these games as we can, and we’ve seen some really interesting stuff come out. It sounds like that would come with different kinds of programming and design challenges. That’s certainly true. There’s a term in programming, “hard coding,” which basically means that you write the whole game directly in code. Everything in the game is written, and it can never be changed because it’s in the code that will be compiled into the executable file. There are other ways of doing it, though. For example, Civ IV has a variety of units, such as archers, spearmen, chariots, tanks, and aircraft carriers. But instead of hard coding all that information, we put those units into a data file. It looks almost like a spreadsheet where the first line is warrior, the second line is January/February 009 Education required No specific degree is required, but programmers with a master’s degree are the most highly compensated. Experience is required, even if it is on games you’ve created yourself.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2009

Imagine Magazine - John Hopkins - January/February 2009
Contents
Letters
Big Problems
In My Own Words
Witness to a Pandemic
An Ounce of Prevention
Of Math and Measles
Predicting the Next Pandemic
Medicine, Medicine Everywhere
Food Matters
Looking for a Challenge? Try Summer College!
CTY: The Real Deal
Hot Topic
Selected Opportunities & Resources
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Middle Ground
One Step Ahead
Exploring Career Options
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Creative Minds Imagine
Sudoku
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2009