The North American Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 86

and Bogost 2009, 2-3). Game consoles, much more tightly controlled and
predictable from a hardware perspective, make them easier to develop and
deploy to in comparison with personal computers, which can vary dras-
tically with regard to installed hardware, software and even “malware,”
which can negatively impact the performance of a game.
Game consoles are thus the foundation from which games grow. Whereas
all three of the major game console manufacturers also maintain “First
Party Studios” (detailed further in the following) and their own game pub-
lishing divisions, their focus is on the hardware and software that supports
games and not games themselves. Yet, many players would be hard-pressed
to say who actually developed a given game title. The manufacture is the
most visible brand for most games, especially at the retail level. Boxes fea-
ture prominently the platform a game has been developed for and occasion-
ally the publisher of the game. Yet, it is the game studio where the heart of
game development beats.
THE VIDEO GAME “STUDIO”
Video game studios are companies that develop games for any given plat-
form. Studios range in size from very small teams to very large studios
working on multiple titles simultaneously. Game studios often employ a
number of support staf , but the bulk of the workers are artists, engineers
and designers. Producers, leads and group managers make up the remain-
der. Some studios maintain their own Quality Assurance (Q/A) teams, but
this is increasingly uncommon, with Q/A being outsourced or performed
by “interns” from local universities.
Artists increasingly make up the majority of those working in game
studios. As the amount of content expected by players has increased, so
too has the number of artists needed to create this content. Artists often
specialize in particular aspects of content creation, especially as a studio
increases in size. Modellers create the 3-D meshes that are skinned by tex-
ture artists. Animators take skinned meshes and add bones to the models,
which are then used to transform the mesh of a model to create “keyframe”
animations or procedural animations. These same bones are often used by
a game's engine to apply physics simulations. Audio artists will create small
sounds to be included as ef ects, background music, or music segmented in
ways that can later be reassembled by a game's engine according to par-
ticular rule-sets.
Twenty to thirty per cent of a game studio's development staf is often
composed of game designers. Game designers range from level designers to
high-level designers. Level or “mission” designers are tasked with construct-
ing the levels of a game or scenarios that are played by the user. Higher-level
designers focus on the overall “mechanics” of a game. The mechanics of a
game are at a basic level the rules. Yet, mechanics are more complex than this,