This article originally appeared on GameBusiness.jp (http://www.gamebusiness.jp/article.php?id=5266) in Japanese. It has been translated into English in its entirety. The article examines training of new hires in the context of Japan's gaming industry. In Japan, standard college or technical school students are typically (though not always) recruited about two months to a little over a year before they graduate and join the company on or around April 1. New hires (recent graduates) spend their first few months doing on-‐‑‒the-‐‑‒job training. January 20, 2012 (Friday) 7:08PM Kenji Ono GameBusiness.jp A First for the Gaming Industry: Joint Training of New Recruits from Four Companies In 2011, the competitive job-‐‑‒hunting season began two months later than previous years, partly as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Students who want to enter the game industry in or other fields (starting in April 2013) should now be in the process of submitting resumes and applications. However, while information regarding large publishers can be easily obtained, information for small and medium-‐‑‒sized game developers can be trickier. And even after a prospective candidate is given a job offer by a small or medium-‐‑‒sized game company, often times there is little available information regarding the training practices for new employees across companies. In response to this dearth of information, four game companies, INiS, Hexa Drive, Land Ho and Toy Logic decided to try something new and conduct a joint training program for their new hires (newly graduated) for the 2011 fiscal year. Joint employee training is indeed very rare in the game industry. Based on feedback obtained from both the trainees as well as their human resources managers, the four companies are interested in repeating the same program again for the following year. Information on the training program was collected and analyzed to see whether it was effective and whether the companies were able to achieve their goals. CEDEC: A New Opportunity Arises At CEDEC 2010, a panel discussion titled Secrets to Founding and Maintaining a Healthy Company as seen by those at the Top was held. It was through this talk that INiS, Hexa Drive and Land Ho decided to work together. Toy Logic, agreeing with the spirit of their cooperation, joined soon after. Normally, in industries that employ dozens of people, companies offer On-‐‑‒the-‐‑‒Job Training (OJT) for new permanent hires. When one hears the term "OJT," it usually carries a positive connotation, yet inadequacies and ill preparedness exist in the framework of employee training. This is demonstrated by the common misconception that the only task game developers have to do at work is make games. There is even a deep-‐‑‒rooted belief that employees of one company should not learn anything from other companies but their own. However, given the present circumstances of the economy, there are also many industries that believe that there is no such thing as a new hire having too much knowledge. The four companies conducted the joint training program in two phases: the first was a one-‐‑‒month joint training program in which all four companies' new hires participated, while the second phase was four months long and conducted within each company individually. All together, it was a relatively long training program. The program received funding from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare as part of that organization's aim to fund the development, promotion and assisting of careers. The fund helped the program achieve some of its goals, although along with it came tasks such as document creation and registration, curriculum preparation, submission of daily reports and other tasks. Although the tasks might have been bothersome for the trainees, if HR managers were unaware of problems going on through the reports, then the program would not have fulfilled its potential. To explain the reasoning behind the workflow of the joint training program, we spoke with INiS HR manager Yayoi Takimoto, who stated, "if companies do not open up to the outside world, there is no way they can survive." Development studios need to correspond with clients as well as other companies, and being able to create partnerships is rooted in one's business conduct skills. "We wanted to train our new employees and endow them with skills that are useful both in our company and at other game companies. It is our duty to contribute to the game industry," Takimoto said. The other companies agreed with this approach, which led to the formation of the partnership. Furthermore, each company agreed on the importance of increasing the number of "douki" a new hire has.1 "I come from a big city, so I'm surrounded by douki and sempai, which has had a profound effect on my work style and performance, allowing me to grow. Within my company, people have the opportunity to make only a small number of douki each year. That is a problem I've noticed for some time," said Tomohiro Kondo, who is a producer at Land Ho's Consumer Games Development Division. For Hexa Drive, the lack of douki was a particular issue. The company maintains development operations in both Tokyo and Osaka, so their development communications are long distance in nature. This year, they recruited one new employee for each location, resulting in both new hires having no douki present in their respective branch. In response, Hexa Drive sent the Osaka new hire to Tokyo, provided him temporary housing, and asked him to participate in the joint training program because they felt the experience would be of value to the new hire. Joint Training: The Lack of "Ordinary" People Was a Good Thing To summarize the actual joint training program and how the new hires responded, the joint training program began with a Business Etiquette Training session, which included people from both the IT and other industries. Around 30 people learned how to exchange business cards and answer phone calls professionally, as well as compose business correspondence and other business-‐‑‒related activities. The participants came from fairly diverse backgrounds. "I was surprised at the diversity of people and industries. The management people had smiles on their faces, while the office people were solemn. I decided to be rather solemn myself. I'm not sure if I can work outside the game industry. I want to live my life creating things!" said Yuri Sato, a planner from the Consumer Software Development 1
In Japan, there is a social hierarchy that is determined by factors such as one's age, the time when one joined a company or organization, job title and so forth. Douki refer to people who entered the company at the same time, thus being on the same level as each other. Kohai refer to people ranked below, while sempai refer to people who have more seniority. The spoken Japanese used by one person will vary depending on the seniority of the listener. This is a very important aspect of Japanese society. Division at Land Ho. Yuya Nagai, a game engineer at INiS, added, "I was bummed out when I realized during the Communication Training session that I didn't have proper reporting, contacting and consulting abilities." Hexa Drive's Tojiro Iwamoto reflected on his experience, stating, "I talked to someone from another industry who earned a PhD. I got to hear all about things like particle physics and other advanced topics, which was pretty thought provoking." The Joint Training program continued for new employees involved in the gaming industry. They went on to review Microsoft Office, as well as learn how to perform Project Management, Graphics, Programming, Game Design and Sound Work duties. Graphics involved learning how to use Photoshop, Maya and other applications, while Programming involved teaching the basics of game engines, shader programming and other related techniques. All new hires were asked to participate in each activity irrespective of their actual job title. For Game Design, they were separated into teams and asked to create a Project Proposal based on actual real world survey data. The teams were even asked to compete against each other for certain lessons. "As a programmer, the Maya lessons were particularly important to me. I had experience using it in school, but that was an older version, so it was good that I experienced all the latest features in the new version, like physics. The Design people felt the same way," Iwamoto of Hexa Drive said. Interacting with new employees from other companies as well as the senior employees who came to observe the training also left an impression on the participants. INiS Assistant Game Designer Shohei Shidotani had this to say about the training environment: "From a certain perspective, the lack of "ordinary" people who all think the same was a good thing. Everyone would have different responses to a single question, so we felt like a group of clueless people. I felt that I had to really think for myself on the things we discussed." Iwamoto from Hexa Drive added, "I learned a lot not only from talking with the other new hires, but also from the senior employees who dropped by to check on us." Sato from Land Ho, when observing the other trainees, said, "I'm still new, but I can already see what the people at the other companies are all about. I love how the people at INiS dress so fashionably, while the people at Hexa Drive look like they mean business. The guys at Toy Logic interact with us as if they're at home, while my buddies at Land Ho are pretty exciting people." Toy Logic: Developing iPhone Apps After the completion of the joint training program, all employees returned to their companies and continued their training there. Toy Logic did something unique in that it developed an iPhone app (called Karakuri Ninja, which will be released for the App Store) as a means of training its new hires. The app is a one-‐‑‒screen puzzle action game in which the player moves a ninja around onto the villain's spot in order to win. The ninja's path is separated into different colors and is blocked by Japanese-‐‑‒style sliding paper doors, so the player must create a path to victory. The goal of developing the app was to demonstrate the relationship between a designer-‐‑‒mentor and the new hire to be guided. Chisato Endo, a designer at Toy Logic's Development Division, was in charge of giving direction on aspects such as color balancing and how to shake up the monotony that can sometimes occur at work. Endo stated that, "Although our company is small, we intend to become a publisher. So, we aimed to have our new hires experience game development of a small-‐‑‒scale business model nature, all the way from the planning stages to the actual creation and to the sale and release of the product." They did not just focus on creating the product, but also set their sales goal based on a production schedule that detailed the cost of manpower (in man-‐‑‒months). They wanted the new hires to experience both the fun and difficulty of creating a video game. After returning to work from training, Toy Logic's new hires were asked to review the basics of planning, programming, graphics, and marketing. Next came the development of the iPhone app, which was a continuation of the research program. The goal for the new hires, of which two were programmers, one a planner and one a designer, was to create anything and release it as a product that buyers would pay for. The most difficult part of the process was the planning stage. Hiroaki Hayashi, a programmer at the Programming Division, was the only new hire who had experience with making a game while still a student. "Since we were making a game in a short period of time, I thought that it would be good and simple to make an action puzzle game. However, when it came to concretely deciding what to create, it was hard to make judgments due to the lack of evaluation standards," Hayashi said. Moreover, when it came to game engines, he added that, "It wasn't that were weren't going to use them, but rather that as new employees, we didn't even know such things existed." They somehow managed to complete a trial version of Karakuri Ninja. However, after testing the game out internally, they found that the ninja's movements unpolished and its overall tempo lacking. As a result, they went back and refined the game's controls many times, eventually going with flick controls rather than simple touch controls, allowing the ninja to be controlled well. They also adjusted the game's difficulty by making it more gradual, in response to feedback saying the game was too difficult to clear. Reflecting back on this experience, Endo said, "I felt that the team had flexibility when they decided to redo the game's controls from scratch. I wish we had that flexibility when we were new employees." Endo also added that, "It's interesting supervising over young employees." For her, the evaluation of new employees get also a reflection of her own performance. INiS: Smartphone Apps and Planning While INiS has not yet reached the stage of developing apps, they are also looking into and formulating ideas for smartphone content. INiS also put its new hires through a Microsoft Office training session. As part of their hands on training, they created mock company overview files using Word, while making files pertaining to financial records using Excel. They made app proposals in PowerPoint, managed schedule data in Project and used Visio to create workflow diagrams for video games. "Even mid-‐‑‒career employees find these tasks to be difficult," Takimoto explained. Nagai, Shidotani and Yuki Tadano were involved in the planning of an "INiS-‐‑‒style" music game. A groovy star is shown in the center of the TV screen, and the player uses the game's controls to come up with his or her own rhythm. "We made something that can make parties even more lively," said Shidotani. "We did the planning for the game, which was more than just about simply tapping an icon. We made it so that it could be enjoyed as a synthesizer," added Tadano. According to Takimoto, "the stuff they came up with was very well done and we have received many positive remarks about them. The new hires warned us that they were bad workers, but that is certainly not how things turned out." She also says that their sempai, who have now been at INiS for two years, have even gotten plenty of push from their kouhai, the new hires. Land Ho and Hexa Drive: Developers of Core Video Games For Land Ho, OJT was an asset to the development of a console game, Ubisoft's Just Dance Kids 2. The game was developed simultaneously for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii, and each version required the Kinect, PlayStation Move and Wi Remote accessories respectively. The game's UI was developed using a Flash base and required 7 to 8 different companies to work together to create a product that carried the essence of a console game. After Sato completed her training, she was assigned to Just Dance Kids 2 was a newly hired planner. Reflecting on the experience, Sato said, "I was involved with the game right up until its release, so I gained a lot of confidence in myself during its development." Kondo agreed, adding that, "while it's important for a programmer to go through an organized training program, it's also important for one to be involved from beginning to end." All of this also depends on a project's timing. If there is no project lined up for the following year, then an employee will be moved to a different department, such as from console gaming to mobile gaming, in accordance with the company's current circumstances. Following the completion of the training program, Hexa Drive conducted OJT at both its Tokyo and Osaka branches for their two new hires. They received guidance from their sempai, with Iwamoto in the Mobile Division and Nakayama spending each day working on console games. At the same time, they also helped set up development environments, prepared meeting rooms for televised conference calls, and did cleaning and other miscellaneous tasks new hires are expected to do. Hexa Drive also does something that is rare even in the gaming industry: making marketable the technical skill of programmers. Mid-‐‑‒career hires can be planners and designers, but regular new hires tend to be programmers. Yuko Shibayama, who works in the business department of Hexa Drive, stated that, "we want our company to grow to the point in which the development and research of apps can be performed just by new hires. We are currently empowering our new hires in order to achieve that." The Meaning of Joint Training The joint training program for new hires described in this article was five months in duration. How effective did it turn out to be? Endo at Toy Logic's remarked on the effectiveness of the joint training program by stating, "all we did for the previous year's new hire training program were lectures and OJT. If we had to compare it to this year, we feel that this year's new hires were more effectively trained." In fall of 2010, Land Ho began enlisting outside assistance for training members of its Planning Division. They saw how effective that turned out to be for Land Ho's planners, which led them to once again enlisting outside help for the new hires that followed. Reflecting on the experience, Kondo remarked, "when trying to plan, we asked planners to come up with something and then explain it to us. I think their ambition has really shot up. Our planners can now put together project proposals that contain a lot of substance." The largest point to be made is how new hires, through communicating with other companies, can come to strongly understand the essence of their own company. In creative industries, the essence of a company is said to be the foundation of that company's ability to create (although this is something that cannot be quantified, so actual research on this is lagging). And while the balance of shared information and NDAs remains a secret within the gaming industry, due to a rise in number of lectures and networking events in which they participate, employees ought to learn how to be "street smart" while they are still new hires. The game industry is expanding and its connection with other industries is increasing alongside it. Land Ho developed an app that was shown at Tokyo Motor Show 2011 called Smart Mobility Life Simulation: Experiencing the Near Future with Kinect. Land Ho feels that the need for cross-‐‑‒industry of content is growing, and that it is necessary to invest in personnel who can work across industries, which is why they have internally trained their new hires in from zero. The four companies that participated in the joint training program are now looking into fiscal next year with the hope that more industries will participate. For students who are currently job hunting, a job offer is not the end goal of one's endeavors, but just the first step in the process of making a video game. In choosing an industry to work in, it is crucial to look into how much that industry can allow for the development of one's potential. TRANSLATION BY LAND HO CO. LTD. ©2012