GCG Student Postmortem: Northrop Grumman Recruitment Game

Author: by Staff

In this latest feature for Gamasutra sister educational site Game Career Guide, James Portnow and his fellow Carnegie Mellon team describes what went right and what went wrong in creating a '5 minute experience' flight combat game for the Northrop Grumman Corporation, intended to draw in potential recruits at job fairs. In this excerpt, Portnow describes the genesis of the project and the challenges specific to the requests the corporation made: “Northrop Grumman approached Carnegie Mellon with a dilemma: they couldn't hire enough qualified engineers because most college grads wanted to work for Microsoft, Google, or Activision. They needed something to make them ‘cooler'. Clearly, our answer was a game. After talking with them for some time we found out that they did most of their recruiting at college recruiting fairs, so we made a five minute experience to draw people to their booth. Early on we decided that our job was just to attract people, the recruiter would sell the job so long as there were people to sell it to. This presented a group of interesting challenges, from how to design an almost instructionless experience to making the game portable enough for the recruiters to take with them to recruiting fairs but far and away the most interesting challenge was working with a big corporate client that new it wanted a game but didn't really know what a game was." You can now read the complete feature, for the full story of what worked and what didn't as the Carnegie Mellon team finished the title (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).