My experience predates any of the super-toxic elements like loot boxes, but I would guess that people mostly just shrug and do it if the client / boss says to do it. I mean, somewhere are engineers who are implementing all these features; you don’t really hear of a company that wanted to make them but was having any level of trouble getting their people to make it happen. There might be a certain level of back-and-forth at the design level about what we want to do and what type of game we want to make, but it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that the toxic features make a ton of money, which is usually the goal. I think it probably forms just one more nugget of the bullshit that periodically comes down the conveyor belt.

We only had one intense ethical argument that I remember; we were contracted for work by an organization that’s widely known for doing bad real-world things and had a big debate in the office over whether it was worth taking the contract. Ultimately I and the other lefties who were against it were overruled, and we took the contract. We did stick to a firm policy of no porn, even in the early hungry days, but I think that was more for reputational reasons than any kind of ethical standard.

Artful indie games? Yes. I got genuinely emotional when the stag in Hollow Knight was talking about how when this whole task is done he’s gonna leave Hallownest and see if he can find some of his family.

Most games, no. The industry is changing so it’s not even a reliable money-and-comfortable-life ticket like it used to be. Games specifically always tended to underpaid and overworked compared with the tech industry as a whole. And, with rare exceptions, the “product” you’re working on is gonna be just an engineered dopamine-and-microtransactions machine which is doing more harm than good once it’s let out into the world.

Ask me if I’m bitter 🥲. I got to work with some really great people at times and I’m still in touch with a few of them, but for the most part you have to get incredibly lucky to find a job in the games industry that’s a worthwhile thing to do with your time.

The industry is clearly changing a lot with AI now and it’s not clear where it’s gonna end up. Applying for jobs at entry level is gonna be tough, tough, tough when you’re competing against all these laid-off game programmers who are victims of the seismic shift in the whole tech industry in general. Applying as just one more resume on the pile was always a disadvantage but now I think it’s a lot worse.

I can only really tell you what worked for me in the past; I actually don’t have a complete answer for you. Having someone on the inside of the company who’s your advocate is key. I got one great interview because a couple of people who worked for the company had seen a hobby project I worked on when we were all in school together and so they knew I knew my stuff, another job came from people who’d worked at a client of my company and so they’d worked with me directly. I almost always got the job through “back channel” talking with people at the place I was going to be working, and then they put me in the pipeline as opposed to knocking on the door with resume in hand.

This is just guessing, but one idea if it were me trying to break in now, I think I would find an open-source project that’s games adjacent or that people in the games industry depend on. Start making projects with it, get involved in the development, become known in that little community as someone who knows their stuff. Contribute good stuff that takes the whole project forward. Then if you see a job opening at a company related to someone you have contact with from that whole endeavor, reach out to that person directly talking about the job. If they know you and that you genuinely know your stuff and they’ve worked with you and you’ve helped them, you are instantly higher up in the resume pile even than even someone who has a way more “qualified” resume.

You can’t fake it though. You have to actually be producing stuff that people can see the quality of, otherwise they’ll take away a totally different view of you. But idk, mess around with Gaussian splatting or an open-source game AI library or something, try to make something good and you can become known as someone who produces good stuff.

I’ve actually been away from the engineering world for some time now; it’s purely a hobby for me now so that’s just pure guessing. But that’s my thoughts on it for what they’re worth. And you wouldn’t have to stop applying for jobs or anything while you’re doing that; it’s just a way to progressively add some strength to your pitch over time.

I’m a little unusual in that I didn’t play a ton of games while I was working there. I had my games that I liked but I wasn’t a “gamer,” whereas most of the employees got into it because of some level of love for video games in general. There were actually games I worked on for significant lengths of time sometimes without even having played the game even once as a game. It was just a programming project, which that I had some love for and that was the side of it that I enjoyed.

To your actual question, I actually find it’s the opposite. Like you can know all about anatomy and psychology and if you look at a sexy person of the appropriate gender, they’re still gonna be sexy. The game is either fun or it isn’t. If it’s fun, it’s kind of cool to be able to see little design elements that might not be obvious and see how they’re working well to make it a good experience. It’s another layer of experiencing the game but for me it doesn’t take away from the enjoyment on the other level.

Fun story, we actually did a partnership with a local school one time and invited a bunch of the kids in to take a look at what we did all day, and for my part of the day’s presentation I made a custom build of the game I happened to be working on which showed a lot of the behind-the-scenes trickery. Like it would pop up little wireframe cubes around all the objects so you could see how this integrated scene was actually made up out of cunningly pasted-together models, or I could fly up and look back down and see how the section of the world that was the path I’d been traveling down was the only part of the world that actually existed and everything outside was just empty. It would show path nodes so that you could see how NPCs running around were following these very defined and limited pathways. It worked perfectly. The kids were super into it and it was like I was a wizard, and kids are naturally attuned to probing the limits and lies of the presented worldview, so they were fascinated. It was super cool.

Sitting in front of a screen living in this faraway world of functions and pointers all day every day was making me a weirdo. There were some other factors but that was the big one.

Probably Hollow Knight.