Interviewing For Game Design

[Music] please silence your cellphone's also I'm gonna throw one in there if you got an iPad don't don't just hold it up taking pictures of the slides really distracting but for evaluations you guys will receive an email after the session please fill those out I'll read them GDC I'll read them they really help us out on top of that after this and I'll say this at the end I'll be in a wrap-up room to answer any questions I'm probably gonna be really tight on time so I won't be up here answering questions other than that

I hope you guys enjoyed thanks for showing out in a Friday morning I'm Richard Carrillo I'm a game director at Ubisoft Toronto and welcome to interviewing for game design my goal in doing this talk wasn't to stand here and say hey I'm amazing interviewer you guys should do what I do although if you feel that way at the end is totally fine my goal was to solve a problem that I noticed in my studio and I expect may exist at many others so I've been at Ubisoft Toronto for over five years interviewing candidates as we

grew from 150 to over 500 people and in that time of interview of candidates that are in no way game designers all the way to people who are industry experts and five years later I still go into interviews and end up talking to candidates that are not game designers but the problem was that other interviewers in our studio other game directors other senior designers I had give them a thumbs up and instantly I thought okay what's the how do we solve this what questions are you asking that lead you to such a positive assessment what

questions am I asking that leave me such a negative assessment and how can resolve that so this is more of an interview post-mortem as I deep dive into the process as we've gone through at our studio and I hope that other Studios can use this to better their own hiring practices and even candidates can use this to understand what's going to happen in the interview process and also what to expect from the job so when I noticed this problem my first instinct of course was to talk to the other interviewers figure out what questions they're

asking figure out what answers they're expecting and then also to kind of watch them interview and see what's going on and I notice a lot of the standard go twos that you'd expect first off deep dive into experience so obviously the interviewer pulls out the resume ask them to Ruge do a quick rundown and then starts probing at interesting points along the way and this can lead to what I call the resume trap that candidate has put everything they can talked about on that resume and you're probably gonna spend a majority of your time trying

to see if they actually did what they said they did but even after that if you determine that they have experience it still doesn't say whether or not they're a good game designer just that they have experience also I notice a lot of questions about process and documentation I never really understood process questions the answers generally are these in a perfect world this is what I believe my process is and most answers to process questions start to sound the same from Canada to candidate so doesn't really do a good job at separating candidates in game

ideas a lot of interviewers will ask questions about hey can you pitch an idea for a game you really like can you pitch an idea for our game that you're interviewing for and everyone has ideas and I'll say this throughout the presentation game designers do not come up with game ideas that's not our job our job is to pick all the different ideas we reference from other games we reference from the team put those ideas into systems and make sure we're building something that actually works so when you ask about game ideas and ask them

when the pitch came out as an interview you're not really determining if they're a game designer or a game enthusiast and of course again everyone has ideas and finally this is a major one you end up spending a lot of time testing interviewing skills instead of testing job skills a lot of interview questions are those open broad questions where even if you ask as the candidate what you sorry what are you looking for they'll respond with oh no I just want to see where you're gonna take it these are horrible questions that end up really

just testing if the candidate understands what you're looking for and can control the conversation but there's a lot of great game designers that aren't good at interviewing there's a lot of bad game designers that are great at interviewing and can BS their way through that process so I noticed a lot of these things going on in the interview and majority the interview were these questions and if they all danced around one main question but they never really asked it and that main question is are you a game designer this is probably the most important question

that and this is what you want to get out of that interview because again they can have experience they can have a process and they can have ideas none of that makes them a good game designer so how do you ask this question and this became kind of the main thing I started focusing on and trying to resolve this problem first you have to understand what game design is and I knit for your studio and this is my definition it may be different from Studio to studio as some studios may be more technical with their

game designers some studios may actually have level design with their game design but for this is for our studio I'm so game designers designed systems we are not idea generators and I kind of said this already a system is a series of mechanics and mechanics are a series of ideas so that's why when you go to your game designer and you say hey I got a cool idea we're gonna be cool if and the game designer looks at you like you're crazy it's not because it's not a cool idea it's because they're stepping through it

and going okay how does that idea change the mechanic how does that alter the system how does that affect the game and that's the mental process for game design that's what they own and that's not something everyone can do but again everyone has game ideas there's nothing special about that we're also problem solvers we aren't design critique errs to solve a problem you have to understand the system you have to identify the problem and then of course you have to propose solutions to critique design you just have to not like something I don't like chairs

with poor lumbar support that doesn't make me good at designing chairs and finally we're big on owning the player experience but we're not level designers and the difference there is level design focuses on player experience but they focus on building engaging spaces and and good flow through those spaces while game designers will focus on building engaging gameplay loops that keep the player hooked and keep the player invested in the experience overall so this is my definition of game design again it may be different from Studio to studio but the first step for me was to

define it and then on top of that now as an interviewer I want to ask questions that lead me to answers that are on the green side and then I want to stay away from questions that generally turn toward answers on the red side because again I don't want idea generation I don't want people design critiquing so let's step through kind of each of these sections starting out with basic systems and I want to give you guys kind of a bad question and a good question that I've seen in this process so you need a

better understanding of the issues we had at our studio so first bad question and you may hate me because you may ask these questions what's your favorite game and what would you change in that game there's a lot of variance to this question but my main issue with it is it really is just saying I want you to talk until I hear something interesting and then if you say something interesting maybe I'll join the conversation and maybe we'll go deeper into systems but what you really want from this answer is for them to dive into

a system in a game they like pick it apart figure out some problems that were with it and then bring up some solutions that might fix those problems but this isn't what this questions asking well you're actually gonna get from this question a lot of the time is oh I like this game but I wish I had more characters that has nothing into a game design but it's a valid answer because you ask them sort of an opinionated open question so breaking this question down a little further again it's not about systems or game loops

for the the candidate to be able to answer that way that's just them understanding that's what you want and then controlling that conversation which is good for them but you may be missing out on great there's game designers that aren't good at that and again it's all about idea generation and design critiquing it's just too open and an easy way to figure out if your questions are to open is take ten minutes sit down write down all the good and bad answers of that question and if you can't do it because it's just infant there's

infinite answers it's way to open up a question and generally if you can't figure out all the good and bad answers how can you quantify their answer and at the end that's what a lot of game designers kind of it goes off of feelings I really felt like that was a good answer and this guy I didn't really feel like his answers were good and that's why you get certain designers at like candidates while it's a it's the same time other designers really don't like those candidates cuz it's all completely subjective and what if they

talk about a game you don't know I actually had this happen to me I've asked all these questions and for five minutes this person went on about an indie game I've never heard of but they really enjoyed and I just had their thinking oh god I can't follow this at all this is a horrible I'm never asking this question again now I tried to figure out some solutions to this and try to change this question a little bit it still get this a hint of the question that leaves it more open for them but also

really making it more about them tearing apart system so I can understand they understand what game systems are but really the only way I found and successfully figure out if the candidate understands systems is to ask about a specific system and then add or remove a mechanic from that system and see if they understand the implications of that and that leads us to our good question about systems you're working on the game of rock-paper-scissors your creative director wants you to remove one of the three options giving the player only two options to choose from what

goes through your mind now stepping through this I started easily with rock-paper-scissors this is something no one's gonna be confused by if you don't understand a rock-paper-scissors never played it and you want to go into game design just you're failing already and again your creative director wants you to remove one option that's me removing one mechanic from that system I want to see if you understand what that does to it and then what goes through your mind generally I don't care about the answer I don't care about them jumping straight to something I don't want

to say okay solve this problem I want to hear about their mental process that's the main key for game design is understanding okay I want maybe if I do this no way that didn't work out I want to hear when they fail I want to hear when they succeed I want to hear the steps they take and generally this is what goes through a game designers mind when they hear this question I just ordered just peed on rock paper scissors the holy grail of game design and they're just completely in mass hysteria usually and completely

confused why would you want to do this you're a horrible creative director but let's talk about a bad answer I actually came up with this question on a frustration midway through an interview because the candidate just seemed like someone who wasn't a game designer it seemed like someone that was more of a project manager they didn't really design systems they brought people together to design systems so they couldn't really solve problems themselves in that way and then I really when I came up with those like okay this is gonna be simple there's no way this

person thought it was answer this everyone in the world knows what happens when you move an optional rock-paper-scissors and this was his answer I would ask why he wants to change it this is valid to a degree this isn't a horrible response wanting to understand the goals of the creative director now I have to play the role of the creative director and say okay he wants it to change because he feels three options is too complex of a system and the user would be easier for the user if there's only two options it's a horrible

answer I know but whatever I don't like removing options okay so I'm get a little frustrated here I don't really care what you like but uh is that because you know it's just based off your feelings and you're just a game player and you like more options or is that because you understand that removing an option builds a less engaging system I'm not sure what you're getting at I would try to convince him not to do that again play the role of a creative director and I just said okay he's not convinced I'd to get

the team together we'd figure it out and this was the key point the interview where I was just like alright this is over like it you didn't understand at all what that would do to the system you didn't think about systems at all you're just thinking about how to manage that creative director how to manage change in the game space and then how to manage other people to bring them together to solve this problem for you and this is another answer haven't gotten before but I'd kind of be excited to get I would remove paper

the confidence in that just like papers stupid no one likes it but so far up to this point even though I thought this was a silly question that most people would be able to talk about it's done a great job at separating Candice and the people that understand systems and people that don't so let's talk about some good answers impossible this actually was a game designer at our studio because I felt so bad and awkward after coming up with that question thinking okay maybe it's such a crazy ridiculous question like it's so simple that it

confused him so I brought it to other game designers in our studio which is I just want to make that point test out your interview questions with other game designers it's the easiest way to play test them and see if they actually work that will destroy the balance of the game of course this is kind of the basic process that you would think of when you're moving off from rock paper scissors if you're moved paper the rock would always win I added this in here because I want to talk a little bit by the different

perspectives of these answers that would destroy the balance of the game is someone thinking about it from a systems perspective if you remove paper the rock would always win is someone stepping through it as if they were the player noticing that okay if I do that and I do this so it's just an interesting opportunity to look at different perspectives and answers you can't do rock paper scissors with two options one always wins or it's always a stalemate of course that encapsulating answer but again I asked them to kind of walk through their mental process

so at this point usually I say okay now what's your response to the creative director because that gives them a chance to take a step back they're not just rambling they're mental thoughts to thinking okay I have to compile this now into something for a superior and this can actually lead to great answers which it has and that great answer being brought to you by Seinfeld so George and Jerry were having an argument and they played what they called in the show the choose game what I call odds and evens and this is a two

option system so this is a candidate that not only recognized that okay that destroys rock-paper-scissors but if the creative director still wants a two option system I can give him a two option system so in this game you have to pick teams one players odds one player is evens you're gonna that you're gonna both row either a1 or a2 out at the same time you add up the fingers and in this case it's three so odds wins there's two opportunities for odds to win two for evens to win and but there's actually an extra step

which is a little bit more complexity now you have to select teams in this game or rock-paper-scissors you want to select teams but there's three options with the courage the creative director thought was complex so at least this is a proposal for the creative director who wants a two option system so again a great answer for someone that recognizes the issues Rock Paper Scissors and then still tries to give the credit director what they're asking for so when asking questions to try and see if the the candidate understands systems or game loops some takeaways don't

ask open questions open questions generally lead to opinions they lead to really weird answers and I don't think you can really determine whether or not they're good for the job based on those type of questions because they may go really off into weird areas that are still valid but don't really tell you whether a good game designer know the good and bad answers now what's key here is again I went through all the good and bad answers and even a great answer here and that allows me to quantify their answer if it's too open I

can't figure out if it's a good answer a bad answer really um it's just based off feelings on top of that if I know all the good and bad answers I can give that to a recruiter and they can do a lot of the work for me kind of screening these people before it gets to me and if you maybe notice that your studios generally recruiters will ask for questions and it's actually very hard to do because they don't understand game design they don't understand how to judge open questions and these open answers so it's

not something they can do easily so finally to test systems add or remove a mechanic from a known system and then see if they understand those implications so this is kind of my great way of understanding how to test systems and game loops but we still have two other skills which is problem-solving and player experience up next and I generally like to use real-world problems I want to see them step through something they might be stepping through on the job first of course bad question you needed to sign a new NPC for a game where

do you start I've actually seen his question asked and I sort of cringed because I don't know even what they're looking for is this a process question it are they asked him to solve a problem somehow where do I start I start with understanding the game and then the NPC's that are currently in the game and how I can challenge the player outside of what you were already challenging but what this question feels like it's saying is just designed go design something which is very difficult to answer and again it's one of those open questions

that's just I want to hear you talk and and see where you go with this now a great answer for this question isn't going through your process that's kind of a boring answer no one can really pay attention to a great answer to this question is going back into your experiences and talking about when you design an MPC why you designed it that way what process you went through that's actually what they're looking for it's not what they're asking great interviewers will give that to them poor interviewers well and they'll just be confused and a

good question if you're looking to figure out how they design an MPC if you're looking to figure out what the process actually is don't ask them what their process is ask them give them a scenario and try and have them step it through that scenario so this is a good question you're working on far cry and the creative director asked me to design a tank vehicle as an enemy encounter two points to keep in mind while designing this one far cry is an open-world game and the creative director wants us to be a roaming NPC

that can be encountered anywhere - far cry supports a wide variety of play styles from the stealth Archer to the demolition man all play styles should be able to overcome this tank encounter what's the first thing that crosses your mind we'll give him this task it's a loaded question obviously and something I give more to mid to senior level designers but stepping through it starting with FarCry a huge franchise for Ubisoft and if you haven't played it you shouldn't be interviewing for game design at Ubisoft it's that simple and I want to stress that for

anyone that's looking to interview in this room I've interviewed a lot kyo I haven't played for Christ's sorry you shouldn't be here you're asking it take the keys of that franchise and be on the game design team how can you do that if you don't know the game second point is I'm asking to design a tank vehicle I'm not asking to design a dragon for a drug sequence in Far Cry that's really complex and out again I don't care about their answers I don't care about their ideas for designing dragons I wanted to keep it

very simple because what's really important is these two problems that I laid out Far Cry is an open-world game we want this to be an open-world encounter which means we don't want it to be an arena encounter which we've all seen those where you walk into an arena there's RPGs scattered everywhere and you're like okay something's about to go down that's not the top encounter we're looking for we want something that is just roaming the world freely with systemic rules farcry supports a wide variety of play styles so what are all the play styles how

can you solve that and what's the first thing across your mind again I want to hear their mental process but more importantly I'm trying to turn this interview into a design session interviews generally test interview skills design sessions are going to test their job skills and the more comfortable they can be in that design session the better so let's step through some bad answers I love doing that skipping the encounter I've had can't a candidate that actually once said okay okay design a tank encounter okay so you destroy one tank and you know what to

make it difficult we'll add two tanks and I was just blown away like you just passed everything I this Canada did not understand what really game design was and what the meat of their job really was gonna be tangents that dodge the question so I had a Canada as well go through with all the steel the tank and drive the tank and for five minutes wouldn't stop talking about driving the tank which completely wasn't this question about an tank vehicle as an enemy too much reference and reference is good generally but if you never bring

it back to solve the problem there's no purpose to it if you talk about which one candidate did just battlefield tanks for the next five minutes it didn't really help out in solving this problem and I kept trying to bring him back to the problem he's trying to solve and they don't understand the problems again I laid out those two problems and the whole point of the question is do you understand what issues will come if you get those problems and try to design a tank with those in mind and that leads us to our

good answers the first one being in the open world problem which again it's not an arena this is now something that's roaming the world that it has systemic rules which generally means the player needs to bring the solution these aren't solutions that are scattered everywhere now you could scatter the solution all over the entire world but that may cause its own problems and in playstyles so this is a chance for the designer to try and think of okay what are all the different player types that existed in that game that I played hopefully and then

what challenges and opportunities can be used to overcome the tank in those different player styles if I have just a bow and arrow how can I take out this tank and this starts to get a little bit dangerously into idea generation so it's your job as the interviewer to say okay what other problems might that idea create that you just mentioned you got to keep bringing it back to problems to solve you want to see as I said earlier if they have an idea in their head can they make can they judge okay what does

that do to the mechanic what does that do to the system with as I do to the overall game can they own that process and this is an idea this is an opportunity for you to bring bad ideas to the table ideas you know have holes in them to see if they can detect those holes and most importantly combined problem 1 and to actually create a major problem for stealthier players people have to bring their own solution and then also they have to somehow overcome this tank as a stealth player and that leads us to

a great answer so this was actually a candidate that was sort of failing at this question I was trying to turn into a design session he was fumbling around didn't really understand until finally at one point his nerves went away and he just sort of felt good in that design session type mentality and started riffing really well and talked about Splinter Cell mentioned we have that we had this thing in Splinter Cell that NPCs are generally walking around with weapons the entire game and they can gets kind of monotonous NPCs don't really feel like real

characters if that's all they're doing so there was a couple things added where sometimes an npc would have his gun far away from him on a table against leaning up against the wall taking a smoke break or he's talking to the other NPC and if you startled that NPC they'd freak out and try and rush towards that gun giving you more opportunity to try and take that NPC down but it also added a lot more narrative into the world and made these characters feel more real he utilized this and turned it into something the tank

could do that's roaming the world the two guys get out of the tank have a smoke break this gives an opportunity for that stealth player to take those guys out or an opportunity for you to steal the tank now again this is tough between is this a cool mechanic system that could be used throughout the game is this is a cool idea but it didn't really matter because in that design session what this did was provide a revelation that it's not a tank it's two guys in a tank and for a stealth mechanic that's huge

because in stealth games what you're usually doing is manipulating these NPCs and it's hard to manipulate a faceless tank but if you know there's two guys in that tank now you're thinking okay how can I get that two guys out of that tank can I smoke them out what else can I do and that really made the design session start to come alive and that made me think okay day-to-day I could talk with this guy I could have a cool design session with them and we could solve problems together so again to solve problems so

some takeaway for problem-solving and player experience don't ask how they design offers scenarios with problems generally what you're really asking when you ask them how they design is hey how do you solve problems and I don't know how to ask that or even answer that to be honest if you ask them on how they stop problems don't be surprised when they say all I think about it and then solutions come up it's a very confusing weird question and a weird answer turn the interview into a design session it allows you to test their job skills

instead of testing their interview skills which I kind of mentioned before and then finally keep the conversation on track you want it to be about solving problems so you want to see again you want to see if they can take that idea and say okay how does that affect the mechanic how does that affect the system work it out through that process that's what game designers own so as we kind of recap my kind of successfully if those two questions talked about how to get those skills those four skills I'm looking for out of the

interview process and those bad questions I talked about how to stay away from idea generation as I'm critiquing those type of things you're not looking for generally rock-paper-scissors a great question for junior designers the tank question again more amid the senior level designers but what about game directors and I wanted to throw this in here to step through this process again just to get it engrained in your head the first thing we start with is what skills are we looking for so high level direction and the ability to build brands and understand brand values and

if we take that further and start talking about a bad question which many of you may have heard where would you take the next far cry so this again hopefully by now you can see this question ago oh this is to open all it's really saying is hey you got any cool ideas don't be surprised if you ask this question when the person says oh far cry could be in space and it talks about space for the next ten minutes and all you're doing is sitting there thinking why did I ask this question I don't

care about this idea a good question critics are saying that many Ubisoft franchises like Assassin's Creed and farcry are becoming too similar of experiences what's the root of this criticism how are these brands different and how would you help differentiate these brands in future installments I'm gonna put these questions side-by-side because it completely represents kind of the point I'm getting at right now too many people ask the question on left not enough people ask the question on the right and it's not about amount of text with the question on the left you're going to get

very open answers that are gonna be all about idea generation is this person good for the job I have no idea of do they have bad ideas yeah so does everyone else on the question on the right you're gonna get at the root which is here's a problem to solve that we actually have in in the world right now and also do you understand the brand values of far cry and assassin's creed do you understand the things that makes them different obviously at Ubisoft we have a lot of Ubisoft values we try and put in

all of our games which start to make some of the games overlap in terms of open-world great experiences but what makes each of these franchises also different and how can you build on those differences to separate these brands in the future so hopefully you guys will start noticing as you ask questions as you listen to questions where they're gonna go where they where they apply shouldn't go so just two final thoughts on where we go from here so for interviewers define game design it's sort of a first step of your job is to figure out

okay what are the skills I'm looking for what does it mean for my studio again it may be something more technical in your studio but you want to add technical questions you may merge game design with level design at your studio which you want to include those skills as well build direction or build direct questions sorry for that definition that you that you laid out and then know the good and bad answers for those questions so that you can maybe even give them to a recruiter so you can understand and quantify those answers turn interviews

into design sessions because again you're trying to test job skills you're not testing interviewing skills and you can actually get people to ease in a little better because generally people get nervous around interviewing people don't get nervous that our designers in design sessions they feel a lot more comfortable keep your viewing your hiring process this is extremely important and this isn't like something to do annually every time you ask a question you get a bad answer I wonder if that was a bad question really judge yourself and start testing questions on each other but if

someone says something pour in an interview if they're going in for the next interview talk to that person who's gonna be interviewing them and really figure out okay this was bad see if you can probe there a little further see if maybe was a bad question or maybe he just didn't understand raising it out to me this raises the bar for the entire industry if we can raise the bar for our game designers if we can raise the bar overall our industry will improve and I just want to add a section for candidates as well

there's a lot of people I know that want to be game designers a majority of those people don't understand what game design is and and so my first step usually is to try and scare them away from being game designers and see if they can handle that so a couple of things to keep in mind if you all want to go into game design or if you're looking for another job game design is a profession too many people treat it like a hobby and what I mean by that is too many people are turning the

nose up at indie games because they like make major games or at mass-market games because oh that's the eighth iteration oh it's all the same I like I'm an indie game person this isn't a hobby this is a profession so you want to play everything reference anything and I tell my game designers if it's 90 plus you've played it if it's 80 plus and in your genre you've played it everything else is your hobby you can do whatever you want with that time but you got to really start taking this seriously game design is tedious

you're designing a world you have to really fill all the holes in that world to make sure they're designed before goes into production or you're going to waste a lot of time for more information on this Liz England actually has an amazing blog post called the door problem really goes at the tediousness of what your jobs actually going to be and hopefully it will scare people away from 1/2 B game designers think out loud your mental process is the main important thing we're after I don't want you to flounder around on top too much not

knowing where to go I don't want you go straight to the answer because I don't care about the answer I'm not gonna use that answer I want to hear your thought process and where you go in terms of oh that the system that works here that doesn't work here ok net fails I want to see where I can take this that's the main key not only is I can help you in interviews it's gonna help you in design sessions it's gonna help you pitch your design systems to the team because you can say okay here

are my goals here are the problems I was trying to solve here's some ideas I had that didn't work and here's why I went to this one and generally that's gonna get people on board more often game design isn't about your ideas it's about everyone else's and I can't preach that enough the entire dev team is a group of passionate people that will have ideas and I usually say ideas are like Legos in a sea of Legos and too many game designers are picking up a leg and going look this one's mine and there's Legos

everywhere who cares nobody cares that that's yours your job is to build something out all those Legos that's the key understand which ideas work which ideas don't work and then build the experience you're trying to build that's my talk this is my contact information I usually throw it up people tell me not to but whatever I love to keep the conversation going both on the interviewers side on the candidates side if you guys have any other thoughts also two years ago I did a talk called designing your design team it's on the GDC vault please

check this out in the GC vault after as well and if you look at those and have any other thoughts on either of those I'd love to hear it so please let's keep this going also after this probably out of time so I'm gonna go to the wrap-up room if you guys have any other questions thank you [Applause]