OT: Jobs available

[Koster]

I queried JCL in advance about the legitimacy of posting this notice 
here, since I definitely do not wish to use this list for means other 
than it was intended, but the opportunities offered struck me as 
something which listmembers might be interested in.

It so happens that ORIGIN, for whom I work, is looking for three game 
designers to work on Ultima Online and successor products. Two of the 
slots are for experienced professional game designers who have led 
multiple commercial products to completion, and one other is for 
someone with less experience.

There's a range of qualifications asked for of course, among comfort 
with programming and/or scripting languages, familiarity with RPGs 
(particularly online persistent world ones), interest in things like 
statistical game systems, game balancing, world simulation, community 
building, plot node story generation, quest writing, artificial 
intelligence (in the game sense, naturally, not the extremely academic 
sense), etc. In other words, exactly what we discuss here. There would 
also be more traditional worldbuilding type stuff, but we're moving 
away from that as much as possible (at least in terms of what skill 
sets we need people to have).

Work would be on UO, and then moving on to future products that evolve 
the graphical mud genre. If you're interested in this sort of thing, 
it's probably a good opportunity for you. If you are in another 
technical field, it's quite likely you wouldn't make nearly as much 
money, as computer games are the poorly-paid sister of CS in many 
ways. Plus it's oft-insane hours, you'd have to move to Austin TX, and 
you'd have to deal with me a LOT. ;) (If my posts drive you bats, 
delete this email now...)

Drop me an email if interested; I doubt there's too much in this post 
that merits a thread, unless the readership in general seizes on some 
aspect of it.

-Raph
rkoster at origin.ea.com