What Game Developers Look for in a New Graduate Interviews and Surveys at One Game Company Michael Hewner Mark Guzdial

“I want to be a game programmer.”

The Game Company I Worked With Develops 1st person shooters for mainstream game consoles Has 100+ employees Does pretty much everything in-house – programming, art, testing

What do game companies look for in a new graduate?

Related Work International Game Developers Association Curriculum framework McGill. “Weighted game developer qualifications for consideration in curriculum development.” SIGCSE 2009 Trauth, Farwell, Lee. “The IS expectation gap.” MIS Quarterly 1993.

Step 1: Interviews to Define Qualifications Focused on what qualifications they looked for in an incoming college graduate Interviewed nine participants: developers, managers and artists In the second rounds of interviews, participants could see the qualification list we had created and use that to revise our wording or generate new ideas

Step 2: Online Survey ed to whole company 32 people responded 5 level Likert-type scale

The Scale Not Useful Sometimes useful but not required or evaluated in interviews Important, has an impact on the hiring decision Very Important, has a large impact on a hiring decision Essential, would not hire without good skills in this area

Programming

Optimization

Design

Specializations

People Skills

Other Stuff

Things to Remember This is the opinion of one game company Social skills are critical Fundamentals of algorithms, design, and C++ programming rated more important than specialized game-specific topics

Questions? Michael Hewner Mark Guzdial Special thanks to all the game developers who participated in our interviews and surveys. Thanks to the CSL Lab for their feedback on the paper and this talk. Summary and slides for this talk at