As I finished my BA degree in Interactive Media this summer, I quickly got around to some job-hunting. I did not want to fall back to my old job, and I wanted to further pursue a career in games and game design. But getting handed a “dream job” in this industry is not an easy task, especially not in Norway, so I thought of the possibility of doing an internship for a few months first.
I first tried at Dice in Stockholm, however their internship positions were already long gone. On my second attempt, however, I had more luck. The games developer and published Daedalic Entertainment in Hamburg, Germany gave me the opportunity to do my internship there. My motivation to applying there was not at all random, as they had a wide range of very interesting-looking, old-school 2D adventure games, my favourite genre of computer games since the very beginning.
I have now stayed here for nearly three months, and it has so far been a very rewarding experience. Ony of my personal goals here was to improve my scripting skills, especially in relation to gaming, something that I have been able to do through the use of the Wintermute engine. I have worked on their in-game engine, I have been responsible for mini-game designs and I have even got some of my puzzle designs integrated in one of their high-profile titles. The two games I have worked on so far are the adventures The Whispered World and 1 1/2 Ritter, a game based on a German Warner Bros. movie. The largest portion of my work has been focused on the latter, doing everything from general engine work, integrating animations, fixing walk-to-points, cut-scenes and close-ups and, of course, testing and bug-fixing.
There aren’t too many weeks left of my stay, and I will focus on making this last time here count. I believe that I have already learned a lot. To use gaming terminology, I have gained +10 in experience and +10 in confidence, and feel more motivated than ever to work more with games and the industry.
I would’ve lied if I said that my “new life” here in Germany had turned out to be a completely painless matter. I tend to think of the gaming industry and the modern media world as a extremely globalized and anglospheric place. Sometimes, I even forget that there exist such things as language and cultural barriers between the countries in Western Europe. That might also be why I got a little culture shock as I first sat my foot on Hamburg soil, experiencing that speaking English here was, in many cases, a lost cause. Even many young people here refuse to speak English, and I don’t even bother to try uttering “sprechen Sie Englisch?” when I talk to older adults. Luckily, the people at my company are all fluent speakers in English.
The thing is, that it is not the German’s knowledge of English that is the real issue here. It is their willingness to speak it. From my experience, young people here are just as good as Scandinavians in the language, but many are simply not used to speaking it. In Norway, people are very fond of the English language, even using it in times when it is not strictly necessary. People like to speak it, and they like to have the opportunity to speak it.
Earlier this autumn I was a weekend in Utrecht, Netherlands, visiting a friend. Netherlands lies only a mere 5-hour train trip away from Hamburg, but I noticed a completely different attitude against their willigness towards the English language. Also, my friend did not relate at all to my experiences in Germany.
So why these differences? I guess it might be so easy as the fact German is a “world language”, and that their entire culture is based on people speaking German. It is not an easy task to find a English newspaper or magazine, nor an English book or an English TV-programme in this country. The Germans don’t need it, everything they need has already been translated, or they have a German version to replace the English one. Not to mention the perhaps most horrifying exemplification of this: “synchronfassung”, or dubbing, of television, movies and games. If I was to point at one major reason to why English is not such an integrated part of the German culture it would be that. In my childhood, the difference between the kids who knew good English and the kids who didn’t, were their media consumption. The kids that were into computers, computer games, movies and books were the kids that also learnt English faster. Of course, everything was basically in English, you needed to learn it!
My advice to people seeking an internship in countries such as Germany or France is that they should be aware of the fact that they should learn the language first. Or, at least, they should have a basic knowledge of the language before even trying to apply. I know that without my basic knowledge of German, I doubt that my stay here would’ve even been possible. Also, if you’re not a fluent speaker of the local language, you should be sure to check if there’s an international staff in your company. If not, there’s a chance that you would feel as a bit of an outsider, and eventually not learning and experiencing as much as you otherwise would.
