Over at Game Career Guide Brian Nathanson talks about his struggle at breaking in to the games industry. Well, his failure to break in to the industry.

It’s a sad story. He doesn’t mention what school he went to, just an unnamed “game program in Arizona”. He only hints at the details but it seems like he entered a program with high hopes, took out massive loans and discovered at the end of the process that he wasn’t prepared for a job (he can’t even get a phone interview).

I am completely aware of how many people want to be a part of the video game industry. I will admit, openly and publicly, that I probably don’t have a very competitive portfolio.

When I was in charge of hiring at a video game company, I saw a tonne of applications like Brian’s. A lot of people have paid ridiculous tuitions for generalist educations and came out at the other end masters of nothing. It was heart wrenching, knowing how much these people had invested in their education and how little they got for it. They’d have been better off using the tuition money to pay for rent and food while they worked full time on a mod project.

I feel for Brian, but I also totally disagree with him.

Individuals with base skill sets and true passion are ready and waiting to be given a chance to shine. These talented and passionate people bring fresh new energy and commitment into an industry that seems to always be juggling profitability with volatility. New ideas, new game mechanics, and new appeal could be created by those who just want to make a game they would like to play. Smaller, more tightly focused, and perhaps less expensive games could be the result if the industry allowed more inexperienced developers to work while growing their skill sets.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful, we don’t lack for them. Nor do we lack for fresh young talent. This is an industry with an average age of 31 and an average career length of 5.4 years.

I’ve worked with newcomers and with hobbyists and and I’m here to tell you that inexperience does not lead to “smaller, more tightly focused,” games. It leads to sprawling, unfinished, genre-defying epic failures. We don’t need fresh young faces to reinvigorate things. We need old non-burnt-out faces to stick around and be the voices of experience and history.

Brian is right about one thing, it is very hard to even get a phone interview. It’s not because we can’t be bothered to talk to the passionate people who wish they were involved. It’s because there is something like a 60:1 ratio of applicants to job postings. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to call each of them.