Careers in Focus: Computer and Video Game Design, Third Edition

Description

Ferguson's Careers in Focus books are a valuable career exploration tool for libraries and career centers. Written in an easy-to-understand yet informative style, this series surveys a wide array of commonly held jobs and is arranged into volumes organized by specific industries and interests. Each of these informative books is loaded with up-to-date career information presented in a featured industry article and a selection of detailed professions articles. The information here has been researched, vetted, and analyzed by Ferguson's editors, drawing from government and industry sources, professional groups, news reports, career and job-search resources, and a variety of other sources. For readers making career choices, these books offer a wealth of helpful information and resources.

Sujets

• Careers
• Employabilité, métiers et formations
• Los ambiciosos
• Computadora
• Gaming
• Computer
• Career
• Video
• Technology
• Economics
• Ordinateur
• Design
• Business
• Technologie
• Game
• Job
• Carrière
• Carrière & Mobilité

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646933969
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Careers in Focus: Computer and Video Game Design, Third Edition
Copyright © 2022 by Infobase
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Ferguson An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-64693-396-9
You can find Ferguson on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Computer and Video Game Design Entries Animators Audio Recording Engineers Augmented Reality Developers Computer and Video Game Designers Computer Programmers Digital Agents Digital Designers E-Sports Professionals Graphics Programmers Multimedia Artists and Animators Multimedia Sound Workers Online Gambling Specialists Product Development Directors Product Management Directors Product Managers Software Application Developers Software Designers Software Engineers Software Quality Assurance Testers Special and Visual Effects Technicians Unity Developers User Experience Designers Video Game Art Directors Video Game Producers Video Game Testers Webmasters Index
Computer and Video Game Design
Overview

Trade fair attendees demo the latest installment of Skylanders , a video game series, at the company's booth.
Source: Stefano Tinti. Shutterstock.
The computer and video game industry, also known as interactive entertainment, provides leisure activity for millions of Americans each day but also creates a livelihood for about 220,000 U.S. workers.
Popular interactive games range from sedate word games like Words with Friends to high-adrenaline, first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series. Games may invite players to interact with highly complex simulated worlds such as the one in Second Life or involve the simple slingshot action of Angry Birds . Players can find games on many hardware platforms, from arcade machines to home consoles to smartphones. In fact, 60 percent of gamers are now playing on their smartphones.
From its beginning in the early 1970s, with the simple geometric action of Pong , to today's high-definition stereoscopic games, the industry has pushed the limits of the available computer resources and has inspired advanced technologies that later became common on desktop and mobile devices.
The industry provides entertainment for 164 million Americans and generated $43.4 billion of sales in 2018, including software, hardware, and accessories. By comparison, sales totaled $22.4 billion in 2014. Content accounted for $35.8 billion of overall sales in 2018, up from $30 billion the previous year and $25 billion in 2016.
One indication of the reach of the industry is the fact that 75 percent of American households have at least one gamer. Although video games have the image of being primarily a diversion for teenage boys, the average player is 33 years old, and the most frequent game purchasers are adults, who buy 38 percent of PC games, 37 percent of smartphone games, and 33 percent of console games. Forty-six percent of all gamers are female. The industry sometimes faces the criticism that it desensitizes gamers to violence and encourages social isolation, although there is little research to support these beliefs.
Game hardware development finances the cutting-edge innovative efforts of many computer hardware engineers and technicians. Game development involves designers, artists, voice actors, programmers, computer software engineers, and testers. Marketers and a network of distributors bring the games to players. With such a large base of players, the industry also supports numerous fan publications, many of them Web-based. Popular characters and settings have inspired movies, such as the Lara Croft and Resident Evil series, and television shows, such as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!
Japan's early leadership in miniaturized electronics helped it become an early leader in the video game industry. For example, Japan's Nintendo owns two of the most popular video game series of all time, Pokémon and Mario Brothers , which have spun off countless toys, trading cards, cartoons, and other products. According to the market research firm, Newzoo, Japan was the world's third-largest video game market in 2018, trailing only the United States and China. Mobile games, in particular, were achieving strong growth in Japan at the end of the decade.
The major U.S. trade shows for the industry are the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit, Game Developers Conference, and Gen Con.
Background
The computer and video game industry has grown more rapidly than cinema, television, or any other entertainment industry that has preceded it.
Many text-based games were developed in the early days of computers, but video games, by definition, are based on graphics. In 1961, almost as soon as a graphic display had become available for a widely used minicomputer, the PDP-1, a team of students at MIT developed a game for it, Spacewar, which became the first widely distributed video game. Ten years later a Spacewar imitation, Computer Space, was the first game to be offered in arcades. The public was not yet accustomed to the kind of interaction that this game demanded, however, so the game that was a breakthrough commercial success in arcades was the simpler Pong.
One of the creators of Pong co-founded Atari Computers, releasing the 1972 arcade game as a home game in 1975. Magnavox had already pioneered the sale of home game consoles in 1972, and its Odyssey system also included the first hardware peripheral for a game, a "light gun." The first consoles offered preprogrammed games, but only a few years later cartridges became available as a means of distribution, and soon a third-party vendor, Activision, started marketing games for Atari consoles.
The 1980s saw the debut of 3-D games (previously, objects such as the aliens in Space Invaders had moved in only two dimensions); use of a virtual world extending beyond what a single screen shows; and distribution on laser discs. Popular games also appeared on new platforms: Tetris on PCs, which previously had been considered incapable of offering engaging video effects, and Nintendo's games on the hand-held Game Boy. At the end of this decade, Sega launched Genesis, with a 16-bit processor that brought arcade-quality graphics to the home.
In the 1990s, a Senate investigation of violence in video games prompted the industry to create the Entertainment Software Rating Board for labeling each game package with the suggested age of players. Also in this decade, computer desktop software shifted to graphic interfaces such as the Macintosh and Windows, borrowing much of the necessary expertise from work that had been done for video games. Internet technology migrated in the opposite direction, from PCs to games, removing distance as a barrier to cooperative and competitive play. Late in the decade, revenue from video and computer games exceeded revenue from the movies for the first time.
The new century saw the rise of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), in which large numbers of players interact with each other in virtual worlds that persist and evolve even while players are offline. Subscribers to World of Warcraft exceeded 10 million by 2010 but dropped to about 7.6 million by 2014.
Two important advances that let users interact in new ways were Nintendo's Wii, 2006, which allowed players to use the controller for gestures such as swinging a tennis racket, and Microsoft's Kinect, 2010, which used a camera and microphone to react to players' bodily motions and spoken commands and to recognize players' faces and voices.
Today smartphones, tablets, and social networks are widely popular gaming platforms. For example, Zynga's FarmVille, which debuted on Facebook in 2009, engaged 10 million daily players within six weeks. Users may download almost any kind of game to play on their mobile device. Among the most popular are Alto's Adventure , PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds (PUBG), Alto's Odyssey , Sega Heroes , and Shadowgun Legends.
Structure
One market research company ranked the top 10 highest earning video game companies of 2018 as follows: Tencent Sony Microsoft Apple Activision Blizzard Google NetEase EA Nintendo Bandai Namco
This is a mixed list, with companies that vary widely in terms of how they earn their revenue. For example, Microsoft manufactures both hardware and software for games, as well as marketing Skype, Windows Phone, and some other media products. Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts are publishers of game software. The list gives a good idea of the complexity and volatility of this industry.
Hardware and Software Platforms
Console sales totaled $7.5 billion in the United States in 2019. Worldwide, the top-selling hardware platforms in 2018 were Sony's PlayStation 4, Nintendo NS, Microsoft's XBox One, and Nintendo 3DS.
Like most electronic products, most game consoles and hand-held devices are now manufactured in China. However, many of the computer engineers who do the research and development work are located in the United States. For example, Japan's Sony has an R&D center in Foster City, California. The industry also helps support R&D centers in academic settings. The Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games at University of California, Irvine, was partly sponsored by the publishers Blizzard Entertainment, Ubisoft, and Supervillain Studios. Major donations from Electronic Arts to the University of South California helped establish a master's program in interactive media, created an endowed faculty chair, and funded the EA Game Innovation Lab.
Game software helps support R&D for many platforms other than consoles, such as smart phones and tablets. The engineering work on these h