Of course, vanity Googling (or in this case, Technorati-ing) is tediously common in the game journalism biz, and doing so the other day for Gamasutra references, I came across an excellent personal view of life in the game industry from Ian Christy, who is a Senior Game Designer for Radical Entertainment in Vancouver, and most recently worked on Scarface: The World Is Yours.

Christy is refreshingly honest in general, commenting of his current vocation: "As a level designer, I’m merging my background as an artist, my interests in game mechanics and spatial compositions, my educational background in iconography, communication, story telling, social interactions, and architecture. I hope to make my own games someday; for now I help make other people’s games better."

I particularly like the initial part of his reply on advice for those wanting to get into the biz: "Diversify your foundational knowledge and skills as much as you can that you might better step comfortably outside the proverbial box. Art, literature, culture foreign and domestic, economics, history, film, theater, sports, science, etc. Anything and everything can add to the mix, and I’m always shocked when some obscure bit of info stuck away in my noggin ends up being the very thing that inspires a solution or alternative to a problem that’d seemed otherwise intellectually insurmountable."

Why is this important? Well, wider cultural knowledge is vital to the game industry evolving - a point Warren Spector makes in an interview we'll be putting up on Gama next week, incidentally - because your media diet will radically affect the kind of art you make in your game life. Even if it does involve Al Pacino's little friend!