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photo: DENNIS NISHI (JON SHAFER)
Learning for Life
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Work and Play
By DENNIS NISHI
Jon Shafer grew up loving the videogame Civilization, which has been the best-selling game franchise for Firaxis Games since its release in 1991. Mr. Shafer started as a fan, hosting online discussions and writing strategy guides on how to play. In his third year of college, he landed an internship with Firaxis, which led to a full-time programming job when he graduated. At 25, he is now lead designer for Civilization V, the youngest lead designer at the company so far. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Mr. Shafer at the recent E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Here are excerpts of the interview: Q: Internships at game companies are pretty hard to get. How did you land one? A: I started out as a beta tester, playing new games for the company and asking if I could help out in any way. I kept pestering them until they finally acquiesced. They said they didn’t have any full-time positions, but they could make a programming internship for me. That was in February 2005. Q: Did you have much programming experience when you applied? A: My father is a computer programmer for United Airlines. He would program me little games for fun, just on his own, really primitive stuff. I kind of picked up on that and started doing it myself. At 9 or 10 years old, I was programming simple games. I [started out] majoring in computer science at Colorado State University. But most of what I know now about making games was learned at Firaxis while I was an intern. Q: How did you parlay your internship into a job offer? A: Early on, I did very basic programming tasks that the lead programmer needed done. But I was also making scenarios and maps [for the Civilization game] while in the internship. It wasn’t related to what I was doing, but it was stuff I found interesting—and so did they. Eventually, they told me they were making expansions [add-on game scenarios] for Civilization IV, and they needed designers to make stuff. That’s when I got the job. I was hired on as a full-time designer after getting my degree. Q: After double-majoring in computer science and history, you dropped computer science in favor of a history degree. Has that affected your career? A: From a very young age, I’ve always had an interest in history, World War II in particular. When other people were reading “Goosebumps,” I was reading [the book] “Panzer Battles.” It ended up playing a major role in what I’ve been doing because Civilization uses history as a foundation for everything that takes place. It’s important to know the flow of history and the different major events that people will recognize. When I moved to take the [intern] job at Firaxis [in Maryland], I finished my degree at Towson University. Even as an intern, I was working full-time and dropped the double major to work just on history. Q: How does it feel to be the youngest guy in the company to be a lead designer? A: I was the kid, the young guy, and they used to tease me all the time. In a lot of ways it was a bit weird for [my coworkers]. But they recognized that I knew what I was doing, that I was there because I knew Civilization, had ideas I wanted to use and brought passion to it. Q: How many people work under you? A: The team has 52 people, total. I act as project director and attend a lot of meetings and meet with a lot of people on a daily basis. I do a lot of programming. Recently, I had a meeting about smoke, which didn’t look right in the game. We had to make it thinner so when you zoom out [on the map] you can see it better. Q: What’s it like to play games for a living? A: People think it’s all fun playing games all day. A lot of it is really hard work and long hours, with very little vacation. But when you do put in the effort, people will see that and recognize it. That’s been a big part of how I got the job. It wasn’t just that I had experience, but also the fact that I was there late every day and had interesting ideas. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
