This week’s Georgia Straight includes my article that looks at some of the myths about what it’s like to work in the video game industry. I spoke with Radical’s Kelly Zmak and Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking to find out whether it’s true that game developers simply play games all day.

Working in the video-game industry isn’t all fun and games. That isn’t to say there’s no fun to be had, and there are certainly games being played. But there’s more to it than that.

The cover image from last week’s Georgia Straight has been appropriated to make a pointed comment about the latest developments in the Vancouver video game development sector.

The illustration, by Kristian Guevara, refers to my feature article looking at the connectedness of the Vancouver scene. In the days before the article published, a number of studios made staff reductions and one studio was suddenly shuttered.

The modified illustration and cutline pay respects to those who lost their jobs. I’m not sure who created the revised graphic, but I think it is a brilliant commentary.

I’m optimistic that the video game sector here is not about to implode the way the dot com sector did ten years ago.

In fact, I suspect that, as a few new games being developed in Vancouver move from pre-production into full-scale production, that up to 200 people will get rehired. Somebody’s got to make those games.

I also expect to see a few start-ups and new studios come from the fallen. As Alex Garden, from now defunct Humanature Studios told me, these are exactly the circumstances that led to so many of Vancouver’s venerable studios.

The cover story in today’s Georgia Straight is my piece tracing the family tree of game development in Vancouver. It’s a wonderful, tangled web, with entrepreneurs sparking new studios and start-ups all the time.

Mucking around with an Apple II one summer in the early 1980s, Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember, then Vancouver high-school students, designed and programmed Evolution. Released in 1982, Evolution may have been the first home-computer game with multiple levels. It may also have been the first computer game developed in Canada. It was certainly the first created in Vancouver.

We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders. . . .

There you can also download a high-def video of Obama’s inaugural address. The paradigm shift has begun.

I’ve finally taken some time to get caught up on the phenomenon that is The Guild.

It’s low-budget, high-fun, and it is not unlike the projects that Corey and Steph concocted in Vancouver years ago.

For us, those short film projects – written, produced, and directed by the dangerous duo – were a hobby, a way to spend some time and keep ourselves feeling somewhat creative.

We found interesting solutions to problems while making those shorts. We made some lasting, some tenuous, and some short-lived friendships. We secretly wondered what might happen if someone with power and fame discovered what we were doing and discovered us.

But we worked on the projects because they were a laugh, not because we held any real expectation that they’d be anything more than that.

The premieres of each short were an excuse to get together with the cast and crew and drink too much and laugh at ourselves and the fun we’d had. They usually adjourned to some karaoke box for more drinking and singing and laughs.

Today, Felicia Day and the cast and crew of The Guild have been able to turn that experience into careers.

Granted, things started slow, but the online distribution model led to a bunch of donations through PayPal and word of mouth – us geeks really know how to get the word out – built a burgeoning empire.

Okay, maybe “empire” is too strong a word, but Day and her cohorts have some heavy duty sponsors for season two of The Guild, and distribution not just online, but online over the Xbox 360 gaming platform.

And Day has kept all rights to her idea.

I wonder, in the era of YouTube and blogs and social networks, if Corey and Steph and the rest of us could have created a little new media empire out there. Created a short, fun, goofy little film – like the one about Xena and her estranged “brother” in which I played some bizarre variant of Joxer – and managed to parlay careers out of it.

A part of me hopes that someday the Feet First Productions archive makes it online. For posterity if nothing else.

Part of me, though, would rather they don’t. What would be the point of being discovered now, ten years older, ten years wiser, ten years more sarcastic and cynical?

Ten years carries a lot of weight. Literally and figuratively.