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        <h1><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><i><a href="../../index.html">loonygames</a><br>
          <font size="1">a <a href="http://www.bluesnews.com">blue's news</a> 
          publication</font></i></b></font></h1>
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<p><a href="../2.5/pipe/index.html">&lt;&lt; Back to Normal View</a></p>
<p>URL: <a href="../2.5/pipe/index.html">http://www.loonygames.com/content/2.5/pipe/</a><br>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>Vol. 
                2, Issue 5<br>
                December 10, 1999<br>
                </b>
              <br>
              <br>
               
                <b><i>Down 
                  the Pipe</i></b></p>
                <b><i> 
                  Want to Play Games for a Living?</i></b></p>
                by 
                  Russell &quot;RadPipe&quot; 
                  Lauzon</p>
              
              <p> 
                

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              <p>
              If 
                you haven&#146;t read this week&#146;s 
                feature and the interview with my bud, Paul Steed, then dang 
                boy, get your ass over there and read it. Damn cool interview, 
                if I do say so myself. And some serious kickass cover 
                art by Kenneth Scott to go along with it. I love those guys. 
                On a related note, I bumped into a good female gaming friend in 
                IRC and she had this to say:</p>
            
             
              &lt;Anonymous 
                female friend&gt; My husband almost got mad at me last night.<br>
                <br>
                &lt;Anonymous 
                female friend&gt; I kept trying to climb on him and he goes, &#147;you 
                are not going to read a Paul Steed interview and then come looking 
                for action!&#148;
            
            
              </p>
              Ain&#146;t 
                that a classic? She also said that she read the interview and 
                hyperventilated through the whole thing.</p>
              </p>
              Ok enough 
                about that. This edition of DTP goes out to all the part-time 
                gamers out there.</p>
              </p>
              Hate your 
                job? School getting you down? Wish you could play games for a 
                living? Yeah, me too.</p>
              </p>
              When I 
                say, &#147;play games for a living,&#148; what I&#146;m really 
                talking about is working in the industry. It doesn&#146;t matter 
                if you work at a game company, write articles for magazines, or 
                you&#146;re really really good at playing games and can actually 
                make money from winning tournaments. Face it; you play games for 
                a living. And it&#146;s great work if you can get it.</p>
              </p>
              I&#146;m 
                on this tirade because the contract is coming up on my current 
                day job and I&#146;ll soon be looking for other employment. No, 
                I&#146;m not talking about loonygames here, because unfortunately 
                it&#146;s just a part-time thing, but my other, real work. I&#146;m 
                a validation specialist at a pharmaceutical company, and that&#146;s 
                what pays the bills. And it has to be the most boring job in the 
                world. For some reason I turned my back on 10 years of computer 
                experience to get this job, and I guess I&#146;m going back now. 
                Validation work stinks.</p>
              </p>
              So what 
                do you do for a living? If you&#146;re like me then work is a 
                necessary evil to fuel your personal life. You make money to pay 
                for your habits, and as life goes on, you seem to have less and 
                less time for your habits. My personal life is divided between 
                home, wife, kids, and 5 minutes between 10:55pm and 11:00pm to 
                play the latest PC game before I hit the bed exhausted. But to 
                play games for a living! Wouldn&#146;t that be sweet?</p>
              </p>
              <p></p>
              <p></p>
            
             
              <br></p>
              You could 
                stand around the water cooler and discuss your favorite technique 
                in <b>Age of Empires</b>, and the boss would pass by and nod. 
                Heck, you&#146;re hard at work. Fire up <b>WarCraft III </b>on 
                your computer and check out the lovely cinematics. Yep, gotta 
                keep up on what the competitor is doing. Better play a campaign 
                or two just to be sure. Shout at the top of your lungs: &#147;That 
                fucker fragged me!&#148; and no one will care (well maybe they 
                might, but nearly as much as the stinkhole environment most of 
                us work in).</p>
              </p>
              But we&#146;re 
                not like that, are we. We sit in our little cubicles, wearing 
                our pressed shirts and choking ties, and wondering why the heck 
                the company can&#146;t splurge and get us real machines to work 
                on. We fire up our web browsers and check out Blue&#146;s 
                News when we think no one is looking. Check out the heated 
                debate on sCary&#146;s msgboard 
                if we have just a little bit more time before work needs to be 
                done. What&#146;s the State of 
                the Wood? If we&#146;re really daring, or perhaps sit in a 
                corner, we might even try to catch some screenshots from <b>Diablo 
                II</b>. Hot damn I can&#146;t wait for that one. Maybe you&#146;re 
                even as nifty as me and have a telnet IRC client running and while 
                you chat with friends. At lunch time it might actually be okay 
                to &#147;run the &acute;net&#148; so we do the same but more openly. 
                Me, I write stuff for upcoming issues of loonygames.</p>
              </p>
              I&#146;ve 
                often heard that you shouldn&#146;t make a living out of something 
                you really love; that too much of a good thing sours you to it. 
                Well, damnit, let me give it a try and I&#146;ll let you know. 
                In my opinion, if you sour to something you really love doing, 
                then you didn&#146;t really love it in the first place. Or perhaps 
                you didn&#146;t really understand in the first place the capacity 
                of what you wanted to do. But that&#146;s my opinion. Feel free 
                to debate me on it.</p>
              </p>
              I&#146;m 
                not sure what kind of life a professional gamer leads. I mean, 
                to get good at a game, and I mean really, really good -- so good 
                in fact that you can beat everyone you come across, and you start 
                going out of your way to find people who might be able to beat 
                you -- what kind of life do you have? Do you play for 16 hours 
                a day? More? And do you focus your energy on just one game? Well, 
                I can&#146;t think of any one game that I&#146;d want to play 
                that much. That&#146;s just crazy. I like lots of different games, 
                but they have a definite lifespan with me. They come, I play, 
                they go. Now and then I&#146;ll pick up an old game that I haven&#146;t 
                played recently, but that&#146;s it. I tend to remember very quickly 
                why I got bored of it in the first place.</p>
              </p>
              I&#146;ve 
                often wondered what it would be like to a game tester. Actually 
                I&#146;ve got somewhat of a QA background in software development, 
                I&#146;m pretty sure I know exactly what goes on in testing games. 
                I think you&#146;d get pretty damned tired of doing it unless 
                you really liked the game. And I&#146;m picky, I&#146;d only want 
                to test games I like. And who wouldn&#146;t? I feel sorry for 
                the poor souls that game tested Trespasser.</p>
              </p>
              So what&#146;s 
                your dream job in the game industry? I&#146;d actually like to 
                hear from people on this. And tell me why you think it&#146;s 
                a dream job. In fact, if I get enough feedback, I&#146;ll go off 
                and approach the type of people that hold your &#147;dream position&#148; 
                in the industry and get the beef on what it&#146;s really like, 
                and compare it to what people thought it would be like. How cool 
                is that? You can mail me here: radpipe@loonygames.com.</p>
              <i>- 
                Russell &quot;RadPipe&quot; Lauzon currently holds the world record 
                for using the word &quot;exhumed&quot; 15 times in a single sentence.</i></p>
            <br><p>&nbsp;</p> 
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      <div align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><i>loonygames 
        - the best damn gaming magazine online </i></b></font></div>
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Print CGI is 
  &copy; 2000 <a href="http://www.square8.com">Square Eight</a>. Used with permission. 
  Article is &copy; 2000 its original author. All other content is &copy; 2000 
  loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. You got that??</font></i></p>
 