I read on Wikipedia the other day that Dave ‘Zoid’ Kirsch, the creator of Quake Capture The Flag, was working at NCsoft now, so I popped over to their site to check out what they did. Surprised, I realized they were the company behind the popular massively multiplayer game Guild Wars.
Guild Wars
Digging further, I decided to check out their job postings and found one for a Community Manager as well as another for a Web Content Writer/Community Liaison which is a job classification I’ve never heard of before.
The Web Content Writer/Community Liaison will join a team of people working on public NCsoft MMO game web sites that strive to both entice and inform game players about our virtual worlds. This person is responsible for quickly converting content into web pages, and posting them to the appropriate sections of the web site.
Other Responsibilities include:
- Analyzes community information needs and plans for short and long-term site development.
- Writes a considerable amount of new content, some technical and some fictional.
- Will become responsible for several areas of various NCsoft game web sites.
- Maintain those sections, adding and removing content as necessary, including converting other departments’ documents into HTML.
- Work with PR, Community, and Marketing Team members to write and publish content covering new game marketing and sales programs including email marketing campaigns.
- Will need to become very familiar with the MMO industry, NCsoft products, and to be able to write and answer questions about various NCsoft games.
- Regular communication with external community/fan sites, establishing relationships with these sites and pitching NCsoft products and key messages to these sites.
Qualifications:
- 3 years experience in web-related work
- Proven web site design, implementation, and maintenance (include URLs with application) preferably with other MMOs either through employment with a game company, or through third party gaming websites.
- At least 3 samples of previous sites developed REQUIRED.
- Mid-level HTML coding knowledge
- Expert knowledge of English grammar
- Expert knowledge of web copywriting techniques
- Knowledge of website usability
- Experience with Movable Type and Macromedia Contribute a plus.
- Photoshop and other graphics creation/editing skills
- Excellent writing skills (writing samples requested) both technical and fictional
- Ability to understand and learn MMO games quickly
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team
- Ability to correspond with the public, good judgment
Now get a load of what they’d prefer to have in a candidate.
Preferred:
- The ideal candidate will already be familiar and have experience with MMOs and NCsoft games.
- The ideal candidate for this position is a game industry veteran familiar with creating centralized websites for gamers to learn everything they need to know about their favorite game.
- Terms like +4% to INT shouldn’t be unfamiliar or scary to you.
- If you have written player guides, strategy guides, or created intricate stats tables for no good reason other than to help your fellow gamers, you are one of us and we would love to see your work.
- Previous experience as a writer/editor for a computer game blog and/or community site is a big plus.
All in all, I’d say I meet 80% to 90% of this job’s qualifications (and my portfolio work with large game publishers, like Sierra and Activision, as well as my previous community fan site experience displays this). As usual though, the company is based elsewhere (Austin, Texas) and it looks like they need someone to work locally. I find this somewhat frustrating since you’re primarily working in a virtual environment online and thus should be able to work from anywhere, yet I realize the critical aspects of the job are probably internal collaboration within the company and that’s really difficult to do if you’re not face to face (and I’ve had experience with that myself).
On the plus side of things, a job posting like this is really nice to see and gives me hope. To me it solidifies a lot of the work and research I’ve been doing with communities and their cultures. It proves that there are companies out there who value a strong relationship with their customers and are willing to work hard at building a community hub of information and guides with which people can immerse themselves within (versus just creating a ‘brochure site’ that provides no more information than the back of a game box).