There was a senior producer on one of the games I worked on who had spent years managing a high-end restaurant kitchen before she ended up in the games industry. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Kitchen management at that level is logistics, triage, people management, quality control, and crisis response — all happening simultaneously, all under pressure, all with a hard deadline that arrives three times a day whether you’re ready or not. The skills transferred almost perfectly. She was also, as a bonus, extremely good at giving cooking advice.
I knew a designer who had a full psychology degree before he ever touched a game development tool. Again — obvious in retrospect. Game design is applied psychology. You are constantly making decisions about how people think, what motivates them, what frustrates them, how they process information and respond to feedback. Having spent years formally studying exactly that turned out to be a significant advantage. But more than the knowledge itself, what he brought was a way of thinking — an instinct for observing how people actually behave rather than defaulting to how a design guideline says they should. There’s a difference between understanding human behavior because you’ve studied it in the wild and following a framework because a textbook told you it works. One of those produces designers who discover things. The other produces designers who apply things. Both have value. But the first one is harder to teach.
He was one of several people I’ve encountered over the years who graduated with a prestigious degree in something else entirely, then, as many of them put it, chased their passion into video games. (Their mothers were very proud.)
I could keep going. The people who came from film production, from the military, from teaching, from retail management, from music performance. Each of them carrying a set of skills and experiences that hadn’t trained them for the games industry, but had absolutely shaped them for it. The island of misfit toys, someone once called it. People who had found their way here from somewhere else, who brought something with them that the industry hadn’t manufactured and couldn’t have.
What The Books Didn’t Say
When I was trying to find my way into the industry — this was the late nineties, before online shopping was entirely ubiquitous, before you could find anything from anywhere with a few keystrokes — I went to libraries. Bookstores. Anywhere that might have something useful. I was specifically looking for books about composing music for games, which kept expanding into books about doing audio for games generally, which kept expanding into just trying to find anything that talked about the craft in a useful way.
I found three books that tangentially touched on what I was looking for. All three of them, in their own ways, painted a picture of a job that no serious person should want. The industry was portrayed as unstable, underpaying, creatively compromised, and probably temporary. The subtext was clear: here is an interesting hobby that some people have managed to get paid for, but don’t count on it lasting.
What almost none of those books addressed — because the books that would eventually address it properly didn’t exist yet — was the actual craft. The practical, specific, how-do-you-actually-do-this information that someone trying to build a career needed. It would be years before substantive resources on game audio, game design, narrative design, or production existed in any meaningful form. The academic programs that now produce graduates specifically trained for these roles simply weren’t there.
Which meant that if you wanted to learn, you had to find another way in. And then you had to figure it out when you got there.
The Apprenticeship That Used To Exist
At one studio I worked at, QA wasn’t just a department — it was a pipeline. Each discipline had its own QA track: audio QA, engineering QA, art QA. The idea was that if you were interested in sound design, you started in audio QA. You learned how things were supposed to work by testing whether they worked. You built relationships with the people doing the job you wanted to do. You learned the vocabulary, the tools, the standards, the culture. And over time, sometimes deliberately and sometimes through sheer proximity and demonstrated capability, you moved into more senior roles.
My own entry point was similar — I came in as a production assistant. I organized printouts. I prepared snacks. I was generally useful in whatever way I could be. It was not glamorous. But it put me in the room, and being in the room was how you learned things that no book was teaching yet.
That model — call it apprenticeship, call it earning your way in — required something from both sides. The person coming in had to be genuinely willing to start at the bottom, to pay attention, to absorb as much as possible from everyone around them. And the people already there had to be willing to teach, to include, to treat the entry level position as the beginning of something rather than just a body filling a seat. You had to be the student and the educator simultaneously, sometimes before you felt ready to be either.
That pipeline has largely disappeared. QA has evolved — the title now encompasses a genuinely sophisticated set of skills, and good QA professionals are some of the most valuable people on any project. But the idea of QA as a starting point, a place to get your footing and find your discipline, seems to have mostly gone away. That’s a loss worth naming, even if the reasons for it are complicated. But that’s a conversation for another post.
When The Industry Looked Outward
Games exploded at several points in their history — moments when the ambition of what was being made outpaced the supply of people who knew how to make it. When that happened, the industry did something interesting: it went looking outside itself.
Film screenwriters were hired to write game scripts. Composers from television and film were brought in to score them. Sound designers who had spent careers building the audio worlds of movies found themselves doing the same thing for interactive ones. Novelists were consulted on narrative structure. Tabletop RPG designers, who had been thinking seriously about interactive storytelling longer than almost anyone, were tapped for their knowledge of systems and player agency.
A lot of those collaborations produced work that remains significant. A lot of those contributors are largely uncredited in the games industry’s memory of itself — their names don’t appear in the retrospectives, their influence doesn’t get traced back to the film or the novel or the campaign setting they came from. But the industry was better for having asked. There was a humility in it — an acknowledgment that games didn’t have all the answers yet and that the answers might be somewhere else.
What Changed, And What Didn’t
The specialized degrees exist now. The dedicated programs, the focused curricula, the graduates who arrive already knowing the tools and the terminology and the basic shape of the job they’re walking into. That’s a genuine good. The path is clearer. The resources are real. Nobody has to spend months in a library looking for three discouraging books anymore.
The path being clearer also means the path being narrower. When everyone enters through the same door — the same programs, the same curricula, the same foundational texts treated as gospel — the range of what people bring with them compresses. The kitchen manager and the psychologist didn’t just bring different skills, they brought different ways of seeing problems. Different instincts about what a question even was before you got to the answer. That quality — the one that comes from having done something completely unrelated before you got here — is harder to find now. Not because the people arriving are less capable. They’re more capable in many ways, more prepared, more ready to contribute from day one. The loss isn’t in the individuals. It’s in the range of what they’ve lived before they walked in the door.
But something about the old path built things in people that the new path doesn’t always build. When you came from somewhere else, you brought something with you. The kitchen manager brought crisis management and logistical instincts honed in conditions most game studios will never match for sheer intensity. The psychologist brought a framework for understanding human behavior that no game design textbook had yet codified. The people who found their way in through QA or production assistance brought a ground-level understanding of how a project actually worked that you can’t get from a lecture.
The island of misfit toys was chaotic and inefficient and often made things harder than they needed to be. It also produced people with unusually wide frames of reference, hard-won institutional knowledge, and a particular kind of adaptability that comes from having figured things out without a map.
The map exists now. The island doesn’t, not really. What replaced it is more organized, more legible, more intentional — and more uniform than it probably realizes. The kitchen manager and the psychologist and the person who spent years doing something completely unrelated before chasing their passion into games — they’re less common now. The industry is better trained than it’s ever been. Whether it’s better prepared is a different question.