Remember way back in the day when you’d spend all of recess toiling in the sandbox trying to create the perfect sandcastle? Then just when the bell is about to ring, the school bully and your personal tormenter comes and destroys it, kicking all of your hard work and progress over with one swift movement, leaving you crying in its wake. For the record, the tears were from the sand in my eyes. While you may never have a chance to get her back for all that she’s done because she’s bigger than you and is infected with the cootie virus, you can experience something similar with the classic simulation game, SimCity.



The premise of the game is simple enough – Build housing, commercial business and industrial lots to provide your citizens with places to live and work and the all-too-essential electricity. Out of the box this seems like the greatest idea; an entire civilization at your fingertips and far away from the clutches of Jessica Whatsherface.

In actuality, the so-called power is little more than the ability to place zoning lots and roads. If you’re unsatisfied, you can bulldoze the whole thing for a slight loss of your lack of funds, but that shouldn’t be unsettling to you. Now it’s the responsibility of the people to work with what you have provided. The unsettling is the incessant bitch-fest that you’re about to encounter.

Pollution, crime and traffic immediately begin to spawn their ugly faces into your beautiful Utopia. Suddenly the power plants are too close, so you shut them down and move them. The streets, which have no ability to become expanded to anything large than a two-way street, are suddenly filled with pixilated boxes. As for the crime, I’m guessing you just have to take their word for it. It’s not like there’s little pixel-people that you can chase down and arrest.

Next thing you know you find out that your teenage daughter is pregnant, you’re wife’s having an affair with Henry from the mail room and your dog just got run over by the drunkard down the street. While that last part never happens in the game, it seems to fit perfectly with the depressing motif of giving hours of your life for an ever-growing supply of malcontents. So what satisfaction do you achieve by building a megalopolis? How about the fact that God is on your side?

That’s right, the big guy upstairs understands your frustration and lends you his angel of death in the forms tornadoes, earthquakes and even Godzilla to punish the whiny bastards. Your vindictive nature is finally satisfied as fires begin to erupt around the city, power lines are destroyed making lightning strike indefinitely above residential and commercial lots. If this isn’t moving fast enough for you, you still have your handy-dandy bulldozer, destruction that pays. What better way to end the game by destroying the world you worked so hard to build with your pockets overflowing with virtual cash and no more whining.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with this game, frustrating as it may have been. In fact, this entire game may have been an advertisement for the Amish. No electricity, no traffic-ridden roads, just a bunch of good ole boys with Biblical names and wickedly awesome beards.

There are several ways that people will suggest that would-be game developers can break into the industry. The three most prominent are to either A) Know somebody in the industry and have a decent portfolio, B) Intern with a gaming company for experience or C) Go to school and get a piece of paper that states you're qualified to make games.

Naturally for me, the first two were right out. Not only did I not know anybody in the industry, my best attempts at art looked like Felix the Cat scribble by a mid-seizure epileptic. While I did manage to contact a company, they asked me about my skills and I got a fair list of things that I should be able to do before reapplying. Thanks, Rockstar Vancouver receptionist lady, you're a true friend.

The next is of course to intern for a gaming company. Several big name companies will bring people on and pay them in peanuts as a source of cheap labor in return for the work experience line on their resumes. Once in a blue moon, this internship will bear fruit and the person in question will be hired on from intern to contract worker until their next big game is finished. This is probably your best bet at getting into the industry. I might have considered this approach except for the fact that I moved out of my parent's house at the appropriate age of 18 and would never consider squatting there again. Then comes the matter of trying to get hired on after my internship had finished and... well.. they're not exactly Oscar Mayer we're talking about and may be a bit disturbed if I went my traditional route of smothering it in Wolf brand chili and chopped onions before ingesting.

This leaves my ultimate decision and last hope - Studying at the University for the coveted degree. Now first of all, had I been wiser, I would've looked further than the television commercial while blitzed off my ass at my buddy's apartment that mentioned ITT, but how could something so expensive be useless? Pretty easily. Not only did they bother to sign me up for remedial math courses, problem solving and some other crap that I tested out of, the programming language taught in the program was none other than Visual Basic. Wow, I have the power. I was beginning to miss the Turbo Pascal they taught in high school.

Still, since they already had my money and dignity, there's not much choice in quitting, right? No that's not rhetorical, I still don't have an answer to this question. My 3D Studio Max professor had back surgery during one of the terms and, because of his pain medication, was instructed to stay off of his anti-depressants. Not only did this lead to some exceptionally funny conversations, it also lead to his mad ramblings of how only 2% of graduates from this program find a job in a related field. That doesn't mean that 2% of graduates get a job making video games, it means that one out of every fifty gets a job doing anything related to graphic design. Turns out he wasn't kidding. Scary.

Two years and $36k later, I've busted my ass and put together one of the best resumes of my graduating class. This is really like claiming to be the tallest dwarf on the bus, but I digress. Fortunately, I happened to be one of the 2% and was able to get a job making 3D animations for an engineering firm. Another of my buddies does flash animations for grade school programs. The rest either sell Herbal Life or are still waiting tables. So if you were looking for a worthless piece of paper to get a job in the game industry, let me offer you a much better suggestion:

Go out and buy the baddest machine you can find, purchase the full license of all the software you'll need and then buy a shit ton of instructional books.

The $27,000 you save going about it this way can be spent to hire a live-in dominatrix who will bestow upon you motivational whippings and with-hold happy endings until you produce quality material. Even if you don't get a job in the gaming industry, you should be able to whip out a decent portfolio and have some wicked scars to show for it!

Now I should mention that there are some good programs out there. If you're interested in game design, check out SMU's program. I've never experienced it first-hand, but I've heard good things.