Interview Panic!
I had a brief (less than 30 minute) phone interview with one of my all-time favorite companies today, Blizzard. At first, I thought it might even just be a cruel April Fool's joke, but honestly, that might have been better...
Considering that I was interviewing for a Quest Design Internship on World of Warcraft, which I haven't really played consistently for quite some time now (stopped around when I started DigiPen), I was absolutely terrified. I spent a few days prior to the interview running through quests on my Death Knight and even starting a brand new character, simply to help refamiliarize myself with the various questing mechanics, narrative elements, paths, etc., etc.
I even had a whopping two-hour skype call with a good buddy of mine to just talk about WoW, so that I could hopefully get more details on things I might be missing from Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria. I wasn't exactly sure what else I needed to look for while questing and what sort of big changes were made while I was away,
Throughout this whole process, I made sure to take tons and tons of notes. Notes which I found were essentially useless when it came to the actual interview. I managed to refer to a couple of the points that I wrote down, but honestly they weren't nearly as helpful as I had hoped. It kind of felt like I went through a meat grinder a couple of times and that's not an understatement!
The guys that interviewed me grilled me for answers about a number of areas in which I felt WoW could be improved, as well as what exactly I would do to improve these particular areas. Everything ranging from my least favorite zone for questing, spawns which could be optimized, raid encounters that could be more accessible, and even how I would go about creating my own quest hub and how it might work.
Not only was I woefully underprepared to answer these questions, but how could I even begin to tackle them without understanding the full scope of issues that the development team faces when implementing content in WoW? Let's not even mention how arrogant and wrong it feels to tell someone their game is broken and they should do X,Y, and Z things to fix it. Being limited to a mere couple of minutes to try to answer each problem certainly didn't make things any easier. I felt as if I was perpetually grasping at straws just to come up with something decent. Not an awesome feeling to say the least.
I'm pretty sure that I'm not a terrible designer and I know that I still have a ton to learn, but I'll be damned if that entire process didn't make me feel extremely lacking and just a tad bit demoralized. When it comes to design, I've always been a firm believer in, "show, not tell." If I think something is broken or wrong and I believe that I can offer a better solution, I have to get my hands into the problem, figure out how it can be solved and furthermore, what else I could possibly break in the process.
If I need to prove a design to anyone (myself included), I can just build it and show it off. That's always been the best way to gather feedback, to figure out what still needs work and how things can be fixed. Simply talking about an idea or solution never seems to come across correctly and honestly, if I can't build it, it's probably not worth talking about yet anyway.
In any case, whatever the outcome, it was an awesome learning experience. I think that I have a much better idea of what to expect next time I encounter an interview like that. No amount of research or homework can ever fully prepare you. While practice certainly makes perfect, hopefully I won't have to potentially fail a ton of interviews just to get that practice in! Hell, I've got to admit that even getting an interview in the first place with a company like Blizzard feels like a really huge accomplishment, so with that I can (hopefully) end this post on a positive note!
I swear, one day I am going to have to make a game about the insanity that is actually attempting to get a job in the game industry. Surely, this post will hold me to eventually getting around to it.