Nick Rathbone - Codemasters Senior Game Designer

Lecture 6 was given to us by Nick Rathbone, an ex-University of Bolton graduate with a good amount of experience behind his belt, earning him a senior position at Codemasters. His talk gave a lot of insight into how to sell yourself to potential employers, and what was expected should you get the job.

However, the most interesting aspect of the talk was his actual job role and how it sparked the thought of strange or uncommon roles within the games industry, that is what I'll cover in this report.

Unusual Development Roles

While Nick's overall title is "Senior Game Designer", his actual job role is "Vehicle Handling". This is strange because, usually, the only titles that are ever talked about are the main three disciplines; artist, designer and programmer. So this inspired me to look deeper and see what other weird and wonderful titles are in the games industry.

A GamesRadar (Sullivan, 2014) wrote a funny piece on this topic, talking about what their first thoughts were about the job and what they actually are. However, they missed the true description of one of these titles, "Ergonome", so I did some thinking back to my product design classes in college.

Ergonome is French for "ergonomist", this is someone who is in charge with making a product have its maximum productivity with minimal discomfort. I won't go into ergonomics here as it goes off track, but when it's applied to video games it can be interesting. To make a game comfortable for players, things like usability and interfacing need to be designed around them to make the experience more enjoyable. An ergonome in the games industry would be a UX/UI designer, a strange title for an easy-to-explain role.

I also found myself on the job page for Hello Games (Hello Games, 2015) while looking into this topic. What was different about this developer was that they don't believe in job titles, only believing that everyone who worked together was equal.

To conclude this report, I would say that the games industry never fails to surprise people, even with something as simple as a job title. But with Hello Games, they focus on what is important and that is the games. No fancy titles or job descriptions, just the passion to create great experiences.

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References:

Hello Games. (2015) Jobs [Online]. Available from: <http://www.hellogames.org/jobs/> [Accessed 15 March 2015].

Sullivan, Lucas. (2014) Ridiculous job titles in gaming [Online]. Available from: <http://www.gamesradar.com/ridiculous-job-titles-gaming-and-what-i-wish-they-meant/> [Accessed 15 March 2015].