Becoming a Video Game Designer (Masters at Work)

Product Description

A revealing guide to a career as a video game designer written by acclaimed journalist Daniel Noah Halpern and based on the real-life experiences of legendary designer Tom Cadwell of Riot Games—required reading for anyone considering a path to this profession.

Becoming a Video Game Designer takes you behind the scenes to find out what it’s really like, and what it really takes, to become a video game designer. Gaming is a $138 billion-dollar entertainment industry, and designers are the beating heart. Long-form journalist Daniel Noah Halpern shadows top video game designer Tom Cadwell to show how this dream job becomes a reality. Cadwell is head of design at Riot Games, the company behind award-winning blockbuster games like League of Legends, which has an active user base of 111 million players. Creating a massive multiplayer online game takes years of visionary R&D—it is a blend of art and science. It is also big business. Learn the ins and the outs of the job from Cadwell as well as other designers, including Brendon Chung, acclaimed founder of Blendo Games. Successful designers must be creative decision makers and also engineers and collaborators. Gain professional wisdom by following Tom’s path to prominence, from his start as a passionate gamer to becoming one of the most revered designers in the business.

About the Author

Daniel Noah Halpern’s reporting and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker,
The New York Times,
Harper’s Magazine,
GQ, and many other magazines. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: The Universe, Also Known as the Game

1 THE UNIVERSE, ALSO KNOWN AS THE GAME
Here are three moments, from three universes:

First: the Unkillable Demon King has taken the form of Orianna, the Lady of Clockwork, for battle. He knows they’ve won when he traps Kuro for his partner’s backdoor gank. It’s all over once they kill Baron and wipe the other team out of the top lane. Afterward, he eats a chocolate bar. This is 2016, or no time at all.

Then: Poncho jacks in after picking up the contract. Once she’s in the matrix, on the boat, she lowers the railing, deploys a launcher, launches herself to the airship. Three minutes through the door to do the job. At the elevator shaft she gets out the autocase, deck, and CCTV module, punches in “setpos 699-32-206” to aim the autocase, exits the aimbot, and enters the blink. The trunkline’s in the Psychocortical Practice Room, whatever that is; she connects the phone to the deck, downloads it, scrams. It’s only later, after she’s jumped back to the Farfig, that she realizes she’s forgotten to grab the autocase, left it behind. She’s getting older, a little tired. This is 1980, or no time at all.

And finally: 14.Bxe7 Qb6 15.Bc4 Nxc3 16.Bc5 Rfe8+ 17.Kf1 Be6!! That was, almost indisputably, 1956.

You are forgiven if you do not know where you are. Only with time will a universe teach you to navigate inside its borders.

The first universe you are observing is the world of Runeterra. Runeterra is the setting for
League of Legends, which, in what is often referred to as the real world, is a tremendously popular free-to-play video game.
League of Legends requires you to choose a “champion” as your digital proxy and then team up with four other players in order to kill five opponents, as well as avoid or defeat other murderous obstacles, all within a fantasy realm of dragons and swords and magic fireballs. This particular instant is split in two, half taking place in Runeterra and half back here on earth: the moment of victory by this world’s most famous professional
League of Legends player, a young South Korean named Lee Sang-hyeok, also known as Faker, also known as the Unkillable Demon King, in the semifinals of the e-sports 2016
League of Legends World Championship.

The second universe begins in a place called Nuevos Aires and continues into a virtual reality within it. This is the video game
Qu