Transform your love for games into an exciting career

Game design is the art of elaborating mechanics to facilitate interaction between players for playful, educational or simulation purposes. As a game designer, you would work with a team to develop and design video games. Choosing a career in the game industry will give you a competitive salary, plus it allows you to be in a developing industry.

Educational requirements: As the video game industry grows, more universities are creating curricula to support careers in video game design. These courses are usually offered within the computer science or media departments. Video game designers typically have a bachelor's degree in game design, computer engineering, or computer science that takes four to five years to complete. Courses in a game design degree programme may include project management, integrated video design and technology, game prototyping and level design.

Career opportunities: When most people imagine careers in the video game industry, they immediately think of developers or programmers. As the medium grows more popular, more jobs are opening up in the field. A number of careers are available, and there's something for everyone.

Game Designer: A video game designer comes up with a concept, which eventually becomes a video game, and sees that idea through to fruition. He or she will work with other members of the development team, including artists, programmers and audio engineers.

Writer: This is a growing position in the gaming community - to write the story behind the game and design and narrate it in an interesting way. Every speaking character must have a script.

Composer: Many games are a lot like movies nowadays. So background music plays an important role as it catches user's attention easily. A great way to get started in this field is to start with composing background music for a video game.

Programmer: Video game programmers design and develop codes that make video games work. They work with the design team to implement its vision for the final product. Video game programmers specialise in one area of programming and are usually computer software engineers or computer programmers.

Tester: A lot of people see this as a dream job: "I can play video games for a living!" However, in order to be a video game tester, you must be very good at playing all kinds of games, demonstrate an outstanding attention to detail, and have lots and lots of patience. They must be able to find flaws in order for developers to fix them before a title releases.

A degree in game development doesn't necessarily mean a career with video games. With training in multimedia, art and programming, a game developer can easily succeed in other fields.

Shyamala Elango is the Director, Educational Services at Inner Universe. She can be reached at elango.shyamala@inneruniverse.org.