My Ideal Job
What would I consider my ideal job? This is probably something that every fourth year student is thinking about at the moment as they realise that there about to enter a new realm of working. The first thing that would be important for me to have that perfect job would be to work for myself or to be my own boss. The other important thing would be that I wouldn’t consider my perfect job work. If im in my ideal job then it’s obviously going to be something that I am passionate about and want to jump out of bed in the morning for.
But the big question is what that perfect job would be. In my heart of hearts I feel at the present moment in time my ideal job would involve me running my own game company. Where I would have complete creative control over the games and ideas my company would create.
One of the biggest role models I would have would be Hideo Kojima (Hideo’s Blog) the creator of the metal gear solid series. This game was one of the big influences in my life and really pushed me towards a job in the game industry. Hideo Kojima took an idea that has being done to death by Hollywood, the idea that one man can save the world but instead of it being the boring rehash of a Hollywood action movie he actually made one of the most amazing games even though the idea was basic.
The game itself seems at first simple but in fact is one of the greatest game stories ever created. The games storyline is really in-depth the game play draws you in to the point where you don’t blink for fear of missing something. Even the music that was used for the game adds to the overall story. It is this way of thinking, taking a basic concept and turning it into something amazing that impresses me the most about Hideo Kojima. He is and always will be a key example on how I would like my games company to work in the future.
The other influences that I would like to model my own success on would be Thomas Hertzlerand and Lothar Schmitt. They are the founders of Blue Byte (Blue Byte website) a German company that created The Settlers game series. There second game Settlers 2 was one of the first games I had ever played on the computer. The game was basic in the sense that the main idea was to create a town and expand it until eventually it’s a striving city.
Unlike other games of this genre of the time they created it so that every person in your town played a key role. For example if you made one of your townsfolk a logger he would then need to bring your logs to sawmill. You then had to go and make one of your towns people work in the sawmill. The same went for food if a farmer grew pigs then they had to then be taken to a butcher. The big aspect of the game that made it differ from others was it wasn’t based on you winning because you had the biggest army. It was more because you had established the most structured and successful town which was a very good idea.
I could probably go on for hours and hours talking about the thousands of different games I played and who created them etc but I decided that the three people above were probably the most influential as they shaped the way I would like to work. My ideal job would be to own a game company that created games that pushed the boundaries and thought outside the box rather than following convention.
