If you're reading this, you've probably emailed me asking for a job in gaming or advice on how to get one. Here's all of the info I can offer, good and bad. This is by no means the only way to break in, but in my specific experience, it is the most reliable. So You Want a Job in Gaming When most people think of working in the game industry, they think of development jobs - design, world development, content management, art, etc. As such, many folks are upset to hear that these jobs are generally not available to people with no previous industry experience. The standard way it works is: 1) Foot in door (QA, support, etc) where you never even speak to a developer. 2) Kick ass at initial job, get bumped to a QA or support Lead, begin interacting w/ devs. 3) Get tapped for entry-level development job. 4) Kick ass at dev job, get bumped to dev lead/associate production. 5) Develop hilarious personality quirks/whore yourself to industry publications. 6) Begin getting mocked on websites. Like most game companies, we generally fill positions in development in-house, so if you're looking for a big money design job out of the shoot, you're probably misunderstanding how the system works. I can't speak for every company, but my experience is that we are less the exception than the rule. We almost exclusively pull from our QA/support guys to fill entry-level dev jobs as they open up. These people know our game really, really well - far better than the average Joe with art experience or a CS degree ever will. They understand the company, who everyone is and how things work. Devs have neither the time nor the patience to hold a new hire's hand and teach them the difference between a Troll and a Dwarf. When they need to fill an empty position, it's easier to hire someone who knows the game well and teach them technical stuff as needed than to get a hyper-qualified geek who knows zero about what we do. Thus, we hire devs from inside 9 times out of 10. As a result, the vast majority of positions that open up are in QA or GM support, because those are the jobs that are vacated in the process. Pretty simple, eh? Now, some better news. The jobs are good if you're looking to get your foot in the door in the industry as most folks wind up in dev in some form or another within a year or two. If you take your first position seriously and make an effort to distinguish yourself, you will eventually get noticed and you will wind up doing the type of stuff you probably want to do now. From there, where you go is pretty much up to you. As a final caveat, if you're already established in the world and need to make mountains of cashola to survive, you'll probably find it hard to break in this way. Entry level jobs in gaming are not generally high-paying, if for no other reason than we get hundreds and hundreds of applicants for even the lowest level job. If, however, you're fresh out of school or are a tortured genius toiling at a local burger factory, you may want to give it a shot. If nothing else, you get to dress however you like. (see also: cliffyb's take)