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Location: Irvine, California

Good user interface is elegant and intuitive; great user interface is a portal into adventure. It enables a player to be wholly engrossed in gameplay and immersed in story. The World of Warcraft user interface team is looking for a UI engineer with the talent to create good UI but with the creativity and passion to make great UI.

So what do we look for in our UI engineers? You must be able to identify and solve challenges within an existing yet constantly evolving code base (the world of Azeroth is no small thing).  We’re also highly collaborative so we need engineers who are comfortable working closely with designers to develop a shared vision and then work to see it through to completion. Being World of Warcraft, it’s also helpful if you’re familiar with our gameplay (or other MMO’s) or perhaps have dabbled in making your own UI mods.

We view user interface design as an art form, and we feel Blizzard is a special place to ply your craft. Here you’ll be in a creative environment designed to encourage your best work, to foster learning and growing as a team focused on translating dreams into reality. We’re on a quest to iterate and shape our UI into the best it’s ever been; until the complex becomes instinctive, and player tools evolve into a natural extension of the gaming experience. So join us – if you understand our excitement and passion for what we do and where we want to take UI, we want to hear from you!  
Responsibilities

• Work closely with designers and other engineers to establish a shared vision for compelling UI features.
• Implement functional and elegant UI features from approved concept images and paper designs.
• Develop back-end functionality to support front-end features.
• Constantly observe and learn latest programming techniques.

Requirements

• Fluent in C / C++
• Fluent in high-level scripting languages such as Lua, Perl, or PHP
• A minimum of 2 years’ programming experience
• Able to work with non-programming team members
• Passion for World of Warcraft

Pluses

• Experience with developing UI modifications for World of Warcraft
• Degree in computer science or related field

Blizzard Entertainment is a global company committed to growing our employees along with the business. We offer generous benefits and perks with an eye on providing true work / life balance. We’ve worked hard to foster an intensely collaborative and creative environment, a diverse and inclusive employee culture, and training and opportunity for professional growth. Our people are everything. Our core values are real, and our mission has never changed. We are dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences…ever. Join us!

Interested? Apply now.

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Game developers know better than anyone that some of the most memorable or rewarding parts of a project can come about by complete accident. Turns out, that was exactly the case for the arguably most iconic weapon in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: the bulletproof frying pan.

In a chat with Eurogamer, PUBG creator Brendan Greene shed some light on the origins of the impervious pan. He says that the object itself was meant as a reference to the Japanese movie Battle Royale, but only realized after putting the item in the game that the film featured a pot lid and not a cast iron pan.

Later on, he and lead programmer Marek Krasowski decided to see if they could give the pan the ability to swat grenades out of the air. Greene told Eurogamer they knew it was a feature few players would ever see, but that someone would no doubt get to see the grenade deflect in action and love it. 

After successfully giving the pan collision properties, Greene and Krasowski called it a day, only to wake up the next morning and find out that the grenade swatting pan had somehow snuck into the game’s latest patch. But as an even bigger surprise, the pan itself was bulletproof even while holstered and would protect a player’s keister from gunfire while strapped to their belt. 

“We didn’t realize it would protect against bullets, you know, that kind of stuff,” Greene tells Eurogamer in the video above. “I’ve seen people bat the frying pan and a bullet hits it that was going for their head, and they bat this bullet out of the air. The feeling’s amazing. Stuff like that is truly emergent; something that you can never really plan for.”

Chickens have a way of coming home to roost in the tech industry–and gaming hasn’t been immune to the lawless, “that’s tomorrow’s problem” mentality that leads to one ballooning crisis of irresponsibility after another. Instead of getting out in front of a predictable problem and putting guardrails around it, the industry tends to let things explode before admitting anything is even remotely wrong.

This was on my mind as I saw the latest debates about microtransactions and gambling swirl around. It’s all been discussed by popular gaming YouTubers like Jim Sterling and TotalBiscuit, as well as gaming journalists, the ESRB weighed in (with predictable cowardice), and it’s even been brought to the attention of the British government. 

That last bit should worry the industry. Its failure to self-regulate, to develop wide ranging ethical standards for the practice, will lead inevitably to the imposition of regulations from without. Gaming studios have, for the moment, been glorying in the grey area created by technological novelty, after all. Most people still don’t know or care what a “lootbox” is, much less regard its contents as in any way valuable.

The law agrees, for now. A recent Eurogamer article by Wesley Yin-Poole on gambling-esque microtransactions in FIFA 18 made clear at the start that:

The law says loot boxes are not gambling because the items obtained from them cannot be exchanged for real-life money. Here’s the blurb, from the Gambling Commission:

“Where prizes are successfully restricted for use solely within the game, such in-game features would not be licensable gambling.”

But reality will catch up to us. These in-game practices are, after all, in line with the letter of the law, but not their spirit. And even the former is getting a bit dodgy, as Yin-Poole notes, because a cottage industry has grown up around buying FUT Coins, FIFA 18’s currency. The coins can be acquired by using the in-game auction house to, say, rid yourself of a card/player you don’t like. 

This underground economy is hardly limited to FIFA 18. A recent scandal that was here and gone involved Counterstrike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and two gaming YouTubers–Trevor Martin and Thomas Cassell–failing to disclose that they were the owners of CSGOLotto, which they promoted to their often young viewers. It is explicitly advertised as a gambling site. 

As Engadget explained:

The site run by the pair, CSGO Lotto, allowed players to bet gun “skins” from the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that alter the look, but not the function, of weapons. Such skins can essentially be used as gambling chips, since they can exchanged at Valve’s Steam Marketplace for real cash, with Valve taking a 15 percent cut.

So, yes, the line between real currency and in-game items is already quite blurry. From a psychological standpoint, so far as dopamine hits and addictions are concerned, there is no material difference between this sort of behavior and going to a casino. I can’t credit Marin and Cassell with much in the way of honesty, but at least on CSGOLotto they make no bones about what’s happening. The only irony is that its name invokes legal, regulated gambling.

“Even if there were safeguards preventing the exchange of real money, or at least tightly regulating it, it doesn’t address the fundamental issue.”

But I would go a step further and say that even if there were safeguards preventing the exchange of real money, or at least tightly regulating it, it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. When you open a lootbox in, say, Star Wars: The Old Republic, you don’t know what you’re going to get.

You can buy boxes in bulk (like, say, a wad of scratch cards) to increase your odds of getting the thing you want. You commit actual money to this. You feel the frisson of chance gnawing at you. When you get The Thing, be it a swishy lightsaber, a speeder, an exotic pet, or a rare outfit, you feel like you’ve won something tangible. It tickles you so much that you forgot you spent sixty dollars to get it.

The old standby excuse, “you don’t need any of this,” isn’t enough. This is a widespread practice for a reason. It generates money because it works. Simply saying “you don’t have to” is as much a non-sequitur here as it is at a casino. It misses the point. You’re deliberately enticing people, then they get on the treadmill, and it’s damned hard to get off. You’re spending money on a probabilistically uncertain outcome, specifically a reward that you value enough to spend on. It’s as real as winning a hundred bucks through your state, provincial, or national lottery.

While it’s far more ethical to show players what they’re buying and guarantee it to them upon purchase, there’s still questions to be asked about the unlimited spending potential inherent to these sorts of microtransactions as well. I recently wrote about Star Trek Online and found its microtransaction system to be intriguing, but also a bit eyewatering.

A pack of nine starships–one for each of the three factions and three specializations–can go for 90 to 120 dollars. There’s no cap on how much you can buy, no limit to what you can convince yourself you need. Twenty dollars for a replica of the Galaxy-class interior, four dollars for an exotic Tribble, 25 for a Tier 5 ship or 30 for Tier 6 (buy three at once and save twenty dollars! A ninety dollar value, yours for sixty! I could almost hear the Billy Mays voice).

As Jim Sterling recently observed while discussing the 60 USD price point of AAA games, that money now constitutes the cost of admission rather than the purchase of a complete experience. There is a “tall tail” of buying potential available to players now, where 60 dollars becomes 120 or 250 or 500 or even 1,000 over months of play because of everything being put in front of you in an online bazaar. 

Japan’s game developers faced government regulation of in-game gambling after they refused to self-regulate. In 2012, the Consumer Affairs Agency outlawed virtual games of chance. Devs had to remove “complete gacha” systems from their games.

It may not be gambling per se, by even the most futurist of definitions, but it should raise serious ethical questions about what studios are trying to make players do, if this isn’t just a bit of shady hucksterism. Even if what players are buying has no value outside of the game, and exists only as 1s and 0s.

***

We come back to the bugbear of every ethical discussion about the virtual world, then. “It’s not real, so we don’t need rules.” It was a lie when it was about online harassment, and it’s a lie when discussing whether or not these microtransactions are a form of gambling. The terms of socializing are indeed different from that of the physical world, but it involves things that are real enough to the participants. The consequences of words and deeds in virtual worlds have always been real. This is no different.

At the end of his Eurogamer article, Yin-Poole notes that his nephew horrified his family by spending £300 on FIFA coins. He’s 11. A top comment on his article went one better:

I’m a primary school teacher. The incident with your nephew is not an outlier at all. I know of at least a half dozen incidents of similar scale over the past couple of years in our school. One went to €900 and had a very detrimental effect to the family involved.

The world’s governments aren’t tabling legislation yet. But we’re already at a crisis point. This is real. Maybe players don’t, technically, have to buy anything; but the industry needs to do something.
 

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

The long-running board game company Fantasy Flight Games has opened a new studio to focus on developing games of a more digital nature. 

The new studio, Fantasy Flight Interactive, is set to be headed up by former Human Head CEO Tim Gerritsen and will take on the tasks of both adapting the board game publisher’s existing games as video games and creating entirely new games based on Fantasy Flight’s existing properties.

While Fantasy Flight Games will continue to dabble in board games with a digital element, the studio notes that its new interactive branch will focus on purely digital projects for Steam and potentially other platforms down the line. 

The crossover between video game and board game design is one of the topics covered in a Gamasutra interview with Fantasy Flight Games earlier this year. During that live-streamed chat, three members of the X-Wing Miniatures development team shared their experience crafting the mechanics for the tabletop game and talked about how those same principles can apply to video game development. 

That same outlook is what Fantasy Flight explains it is bringing to its interactive branch, for both board game-inspired and original game projects based on its catalog of existing brands.

“We’re incredibly excited to be bringing Fantasy Flight Games’ best game properties to life as amazing video game experiences,” said Gerritsen in a press release. “Fantasy Flight Interactive is made up of developers who love both tabletop games and video games and we are striving to create games that capture the best aspects of both media to entertain our fans.”

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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My title on Hand of Fate was “Creative Director,” and my title on “Hand of Fate 2,” says “Gamerunner.” Why? Before I dig in to that, lets take a brief sideways trip into current affairs.

The news came through a couple of days ago that EA had closed down Visceral (a wholly owned subsidiary) and with it the project in development helmed by Amy Hennig. That’s Amy Hennig, writer and creative director of Uncharted, creator of one of the defining franchises when it comes to videogame storytelling. That’s Amy Hennig, who has already firmly written her own place in the history books. That’s Amy Hennig, BAFTA winner, WGA Award Winner, Game Developers Choice award Game of the Year creator.

That’s Amy Hennig, who couldn’t get a game made inside EA.

The honest truth is, there are almost no creatives who can get a AAA game made inside a big publisher. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they mainly come down to a common cause — games, as a business, has no respect for creatives. The number of game directors who have autonomy when it comes to the decisions on their projects in the AAA space you can count on one hand. And three of those fingers are called “Hideo Kojima.”

Compare and contrast that with the role of a director in film or television. Sure, they have to work inside budgets, and they have to (with the aid of producers) get buy-in on their project in order to get a budget to work with. Once that’s done however, they have an enormous amount of freedom to make the damn thing. This never happens inside major publishers. Even the strongest willed of AAA Creative Directors (and I’ve had the good fortune to work with some great ones) has to deal with layers of executive bullshit every day they come to work. They have an endless series of VP’s trying to make political hay out of the work they’re doing.

I have watched a nearly endless series of incredibly talented senior creatives build amazing things — and then get crushed by the system inside large publishers. I’ve seen them travel from place to place, from executive interference to quarterly strategy shift, and along the way watched their games get cancelled before they get a chance to live. I’ve seen people spend a decade without shipping a game, moving from studio to studio in the hope things will be different somewhere else. I’ve seen studios bought for the original work they’ve developed, and then get turned into cookie-cutter producers of derivative work before being shuttered.

There is a place where that isn’t true, however. Most indie studios are creator lead and creator driven. They’re also largely self-funded or bootstrapped. Nonetheless, the wave of indie autuers is starting to have an influence on the way larger projects are managed. As an example of this cross pollination Teddy Dief has gone from indie success (Hyperlight Drifter) through to a Creative Director role at Square Enix. Yet, the question as to whether he can have the impact there that he had on a smaller scale team is still open.

Reagrdless, most indies are lead by someone with a vision and the ability to get the job done to make it a reality. The auteur lives on in the indie space.

On the other hand, I’ve had “Creative Director” on my business cards for 8 or so years now. It’s never been a title that sits comfortably, but it’s been a reasonably good way to communicate with the outside world some of the work I do. As a company founder, there’s always other things that need doing however, that fall outside of that purview. More importantly, as our design team has grown we’ve been conciously evolving towards a model that puts collaboration front and center, ahead of “Direction.”[2] As a mid-size indie studio, we’re very different to a small team of people chasing a vision. We have a lot of other considerations, not least of which is our burn rate.

So my responsibilities aren’t solely the creative outcomes of our projects, but also the production realities of getting them made. The market realities of choosing our projects. The financial responsibilities of ensuring our projects are able to find funding (either internally or externally). The management responsibilities of building our team, ensuring it works well, and guiding its growth.[1]

Now games are not movies, nor are they TV series. The realities of game production (and distribution) are a long way from the way other screen media gets made. Every games company is also a tech company. Nonetheless, TV has a good way of summing up the varied duties that are incumbent on the person with creative authority and production responsibility. In TV, that’s a Showrunner.

“The person who has overall creative authority and management responsibility for a television programme. Generally the creator or co-creator.”

And in that definition is a simple way of summing up the things I do at Defiant. The conversion to Gamerunner is very simple :

“The person who has overall creative authority and management responsibility for a videogame. Generally the creator or co-creator.”

All of which makes a lot more sense. If nothing else, it better reflects the ways that I work (and try to work) with our team. I don’t direct, I run with them. I hustle ahead of the pack to try and clear the way before them, so they can focus on making the game. I help them to set goals, and help judge whether we’ve achieved them or not. More than anything else, I worry about things so they don’t have to. A runner is the most junior position in the hierarchy of a TV programme. They serve everyone, running and fetching. It seems to me that the title is reflected at the top as well, because in the end that’s the most important thing. My job is to serve the game, and to serve the team, in order to create the best possible outcome for all involved.

I have the authority to make that happen, and the responsibility to make sure it does. And that’s why my title is Gamerunner.

It’s also why I humbly hope that the AAA field starts to treat their creatives the same way. If Amy had gone to EA as a Gamerunner, and not a Creative Director, maybe she would have had the authority as well as the responsibility — and in the world of making things for the screen, that makes all the difference.

[1] All of these responsabilities are shared with others inside Defiant. Don’t ever get the impression it’s a one man show — this is just one persons view of it. Most prominently, the co-founder Dan Treble is our “Tech Director,” and that title has the same issues as discussed here with “Creative Director,” — in actual fact, he’s across every part of the studio and business, and is the glue that holds it together.

[2] I’m keen to talk more about our “writers room” model for game design, and the ways that model is evolving. That’s for another day, though.