# Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do here at Min:
Q. “What are your main duties and responsibilities as a project manager, or PM in your position at work?”
A. “Most of them go to the schedule and human resources managements, as well as providing some occasional help related to the game planning, although, as I come from that field of expertise.”
Q. “What made you come to the field of game planning in the first place?”
A. “Back in ’99, I formed a team for planning and producing animations and games on my own. At the time, I did not have enough knowledge about those, but the passion, and all I could do was go here and there for about a year to collect anything seeming to be of assistance that would help me know more about animations and games. During that time, I was trying very hard to get as much information on both – for animations and games – as I was able to, but I just couldn’t. So I was focused on the animation at first. Then about a year later, I started my own animation business, which soon got turned down as the Korean animation market at the time suddenly went under, and my interest naturally shifted to games. I believe that the way an animation or a game is presented to the general public is quite the same in the ways that they give the fun. But I must admit that I had a hard time getting myself familiarized with the whole new media called games in my early part of the career.”
# Ups and downs:
Q. “When is it that you feel most discouraged with your job?”
A. When no one feels the same fun as I feel about my works that is supposed to give fun. You get this sort of experience when you don’t have a firm understanding on how the game should work to give the most fun out of the game to its players. Also, as an online game designer, I get a lot of requests that I can’t possibly do anything about, from players who have come to love their game characters so much. I do all that I can in my power to have them done in their favor. But, you know, we as a developer have to be very extra careful in dealing with these requests that we do them in fairness with a subjective view on each of them, and, yes, sometimes they don’t get their requests done as they would like. So there are lots of challenges to deal with, especially in this career, and at times when you bump into a deadlock, where there seems to be no solutions at all, that’s really hard!”
Q. “On the other hand, when is the most rewarding time with your job then?”
A. “As in other entertainment areas like animations or movies, the games developers like myself, get excited the most when people love and talk about the piece of product we created for them to enjoy. I really feel like a million bucks!”
# Some words of advice to the prospects:
Q. “So what does a person have to prepare himself/herself if he/she wants to be a games developer like you, PB Kim?”
A. “First and foremost, you got to have tons of hands-on experiences with different games – the more, the better, basically! – so as to develop and cultivate some sense of being able to see and catch out why people love a particular game so much. Unfortunately, I don’t… so I am still struggling even now! So you should have a fairly good understanding, or even a glimpse of it, on what makes a game is one of fun. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should and could downplay on the areas like Games Development Methodology, Schedule Managing, Documents Writing and Managing, and Marketing. All I am saying is it is more fundamental as a games developer that you first have a solid understanding on what it means for a game to be fun to its players than that you indulge yourself with all those administrative stuff I just mentioned.”
Q. “Any advice to those who are thinking of taking a job at planning and developing an online game?”
A. “Well, that would be that they need to make sure to know all the bolts and nuts about a planning developing process from A to Z. I’ve seen people don’t get bothered much about this or think this is less important and jump into the more of an administrative nature, for example, those areas I talked about in the earlier question of this interview. But let me tell ya, unless you don’t fully appreciate and have a full picture on what’s going on with a development in its every single detail as a “field commander” with your project in hand, it’s like you are trying to write a good and quality college report without actually knowing what you are going to write about. Then, your project is going nowhere, but just stalling, and so are your colleagues. Remember, you are a field commander!”
