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Comment by burntoutfire | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand this obsession with credits in the game dev industry. There's no credit list in GMail for example, and yet everyone is fine with it?

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Maybe there should be? If we had a union to fight for it there could be. I think it'd be cool if my name was on the credits list of every software I've ever written. Hell, there should be.

This is something open source gets right that companies don't -- in open source, there is a credits list. Both in the contributors listing and in the actual publicly accessible history of commits itself (which in turn auto-generates contributor lists e.g. on GitHub).

In some ways it's more akin to having a FAANG on your resume. Games are traditionally much more project-based than a service such as GMail and employers, colleagues will use it as a benchmark for hiring and networking.

I'm an example myself, as I started in the industry working on a strategy-genre game, and talking shop about the genre makes me more appealing to studios that serve that.

Game studios believe that the relevant experience is much better indication of a prospect's value than the ability to solve programming puzzles for a few hours. Credits are the proof of this experience.

Google, on the other hand, appears to be exactly opposite [1]. So, it appears that, for somebody who worked on Gmail and pursuing the similar line of work in a company similar to Google, proofs of experience would be of little value.

1. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

Video games are part tech, part art and part storytelling. So in a sense they are closer to movies than pure software.

That distinction is where some of the wish for credit comes from I believe.

The most cursory thing an employer can do is Google an prospective employee, and that will bring up title credits on games you've worked on. If you were to Google my name, for instance, as I don't have any social media presence other than LinkedIn, you only get game titles I'm in the credits of.

But it's a silly system. As a corporate worker I have no social media presence, so you won't find anything I've ever worked on.

Instead I have a resume and references which can be checked to determine if what I'm saying is true.

Now being able to do that automatically is great, which means we should just take the whole process on our own hands as software developers and create something that represents us?

Oh, I list my greatest hits on my resume, of course. It's a matter of trust. I don't know how much prospective employers trust interviewees, to be honest. I can only assume they do a Google search at the time of the interview (or just before) to do a bit of investigative work and then a background check before beginning the job.

Because is the entrainment BiZ, there are super arcane rules about tv and film credits for example.

When the game ships, you are likely looking for a new job. And what job you can get depends on how many games you have shipped, and credits are the evidence.

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