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About MeIn this section you can learn all about me. Why I am where I am at the moment, what my future goals are, where I came from. It is kind of a short autobiography of my career really. This goal statement was written by John O’Leske. Unlike other sections of my website please do take idea's stated here as your own and run with it. It will take more than one man to make my goals a reality. Leave comments and/or discuss what you see on this page here Where I’m fromI was born and raised in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. I was the youngest in a family of 5. Fond du Lac is a fairly small city in Wisconsin about an hour to hour ½ north of Milwaukee. The biggest thing that happens in Fond du Lac every year is a fishing competition gone terribly out of control (http://www.fdlfest.com/walleye_weekend.html) Growing up I showed a talent for art and computers. I would be seen drawing in my sketch book or doodling in the margins of my notepads while board many times. My family had a computer that I used a lot but couldn’t really play with. (Mom didn’t want me surfing the net, installing programs, and crashing the family computer) When I was in jr. high I decided that I wanted a computer for myself and purchased one out of money that I saved. With that computer I experimented and played games to my heart's content. I pretty much grew up as a stereotypical nerd with a short exception of playing for the Fond du Lac Rugby team (the stoutmen)
My career choiceWhen I finally got to high school I took whatever electives I thought sounded interesting; physics, creative writing, drafting, art, programming, telecommunications… I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life at this point. The career assessment tests and meetings with school advisors I always kept pushing me either to commercial artist or computer engineering fields. These two things have completely different studies and career paths, so whatever one I picked, I wouldn’t easily be able the change my mind in the future. I figured that I would go the computer rout because “that’s where the future is” as my career advisor would put it. I was just going to go to a local college take a computer class and try to get a job at Giddings & Lewis or Quad/Graphics (local machine and printing factories around Fond du Lac WI) using the computer knowledge. As a hobby though, I was interested in designing my own games. I read a few books and websites on how to make games, what skills you should have and what you should study. I was amazed on how close my interests were to what they suggested. Nearly every class I took as an elective fit perfectly for going into game design. After a lot of thought I changed video games from a hobby into a career.
The articleIn 2000 my choice in careers was cemented after reading the article 'Emotion Engine'? I Don't Think So. by Jack Kroll. In this article Jack Kroll compared games against movies like Akira Kurosawa's 'Ran' and quoted saying things like: "Why can't these game wizards be satisfied with their ingenuity, their $7 billion (and rising) in sales, their capture of a huge chunk of youth around the world? Why must they claim that what they are doing is "art"? And should anyone care whether this emerging medium is art or not?" and "Computer games are reaching new realism. But as absorbing as they can be, they fall short of engaging the heart." I don't like the thought of the game industry having this stigma about it that it is only a source of entertainment and not expression. I know what games can do and what is possible in games that would be exceedingly difficult to do other mediums. In a game you can have a significant emotional attachment to characters. You aren’t just watching the characters you are interacting with them and learning about them in a way you would learn about people in real life. You are a character. This allows for a large emotional investment in the plot, and when something happens to a character you can actually care about them. After reading this article there was no going back for me. I was going into the game industry as a career, with the goal of trying to help the mass public accept games as something more than just an entertaining diversions. 'Emotion Engine'? I Don't Think So.
CollegeIn a book I was reading my jr. year of high school about game design there was a list of schools that teach how to create games. In there was Full Sail. After reading what the book had to say and researching the school myself I decided to change the path of my life and leave Fond du Lac, WI for Orlando, FL in pursuit of my dream. In the fall of 2000 I was 18 and fresh out of high school. I entered Full Sail’s game design degree and moved away from my home. Full Sail ended up being a good school for me. There is a lot of hands on experience and you really have to push yourself there. There are a lot of people that don’t like Full Sail because is dosen't teach the same way as a normal university. Full Sail doesn’t hold your hand if you’re falling behind and it doesn’t make excuses for you not picking something up. Full Sail truly is a school that you take out of it what you put in. If you put a lot of work into learning the materials they will help you all the way and you can suck up knowledge like a sponge, but if you go there thinking that you can put in minimum effort you’re just going to get the minimum knowledge and won’t make it. I would like to take a moment to mention that I would not suggest people follow in my footsteps on this. Full Sail is not necessarily a school you should go to directly out of high school. The school requires a lot of dedication and maturity and that is something many people are lacking straight out of high school. I would suggest people go to a community college and take a few computer science and math classes there first, then enroll in Full Sail later. This will allow you to grow as a person and appreciate what you can learn at Full Sail.
Electronic Arts and what I learnedAfter graduating from Full Sail I landed a job at Electronic Arts – Tiburon in the QA department where I became a specialist in third party standards and specifications (The rules that the console manufactures require developers to follow). I worked as a sr. tester where I helped manage teams and assisted the manager in his duties. While there I learned a lot about the game industry and how it works. Management is very important in the process of making games. You can have the best team assembled for a task but if you have a bad manager leading them the entire team suffers and will not be able to perform properly. You can also have a team that is subpar but with a good manager they can perform things unexpectedly well. It is a fact of life in this industry that you will work long hours and you have to maintain yourself under stress and little sleep when this crunch hits. People get shorter fuses the longer crunch runs on and you must know how to avoid lighting those fuses. I learned many organizational processes that help games go from an idea to a program. I learned more on how to write technical documents for a wider variety of audiences, rather than just writing for your technical peers. There is a big difference in writing a design document for other designers and artists then writing a design document for executives and producers. I learned how the schedule of game works and how to pace work appropriately for milestone tasks through beta crunch. I learned many management techniques and the pros and cons of each of them I won’t lie EA Tiburon wasn’t all sunshine and lollypops while I was there. Though, even with its faults I am still glad that I worked at Tiburon. It taught me a lot of good lessons of how to do things and how not to do things in this industry.
Credited titles2002 2003 2004 2005
Back to Full SailAfter working at Tiburon for a few years I returned to Full Sail though this time not as a student. I returned to Full Sail to join their lab specialist staff. For the first year and a half I ran labs for the school that ranged from teaching the very basics to programming to more advanced data structure and development styles as a lab specialist. Doing this greatly added to my programming and debugging skills. In 2007 I shifted lines of work at Full Sail. Rather than teaching the basics to students I became an associate producer for SGP. This class is in essence a small project for the students where they are broken into teams and put to task making a game as completely as they can in two months. My roll in this is help with the planning and maintain of the code base via UML, to approve and aid in design decisions, enforce schedules, evaluate milestones, and to manage the student team and assist them from having conflicts. My return to Full Sail was very timely as I shortly thereafter got married and had a child. Two things that would have been much more difficult while staying in the game industry.
My future ambitionsMy biggest ambition is still to help video games be recognized as a potential art form. I don’t think all game should be following this path. I don’t think there is a way that would be possible. You’re not going to play a game of Madden and have it challenge you’re beliefs. Some games are just be made for the sake of entertainment and the creators of those games are not trying to create art. There is always going to be an audience for those types of games and the industry needs them, I just want different types of games in addition to them. The closest relation to games would probably be the movie industry. Many movies come out every year but very few of them could truly be considered art. Most movies are just meant to bring people into the theater, engage them for 2 hours, and let them go. The viewer was entertained but nothing really happened. The movie didn’t change them in any way, it didn’t challenge them, it simply entertained them. But every now and then, there are movies that really standout and leave you thinking afterwards and still entertain you in the process. This is what I want to happen with games. I want there to be more games that when the player finishes they are left thinking afterwards (in a good way). Now obviously I’m not alone in this quest. There are many people in the industry attempting to change the image of games. There are large groups and conferences dedicated to taking games seriously. Ernest Adams reflected my thoughts on this in his article "Where’s Our Merchant Ivory?" In the end the industry will not change until there have been multiple shining examples of games that are recognized artistic achievements and still bring enough money to make them valuable business mediums. I want to add my skills and time to making those games that get recognized artist achievements. Perhaps I could help the industry expand into previously unexplored possibilities.
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