13 and already thinking of moving to japan

2/3 of the jobs i have thought of involved leaning Japanese and Japanese culture and move to japan one of them involves getting a job at monolith soft and becoming a director and producer, my dream is to create a game with a story as deep
as most games that company has produced but i want it to appeal to at least Europeans hopefully the US enough to make it popular and make people buzz about it this will mean the game won't have any Japanese elements unless hidden and
no revealing armor or characters with how society here reacts with anything sex-related, i want to be a large role in creating the story and do some concept art but getting that job is the most unrealistic. my second thought and the most realistic
thought is getting a job at nintendo's hardware department and create prototypes of future controllers, handhelds, accessories, and design the insides so where all the components go and suggesting ideas or things to leave out. my third which does not
involve moving to japan is becoming a attorney and focus defending the industry when i think it's right and getting rid of stereotypes which i despise. if anyone got ant tips or suggestions about moving to japan please let me know ether job i choose i
will try my hardest to help this interactive industry which has always been suffering from society and hatred which i believe has a HUGE amount of potential

 

Hmm...

I don't want to squash your dreams, but think of a few other things.

1) By the time you're out of University and able to actually move to Japan (roughly 10 years from now) the industry will likely be someplace entirely different. It might even be better than now. Probably not, but maybe...
1b) You're going to be an entirely different person. Some people stick w/ their hobbies from such a young age, but I don't think it's the norm. This is coming from someone that's spent more years in Japan than you've spent alive, btw.

2) Many people have thought/tried the same thing. It's not easy. There are a handful of franchises in the big picture which are popular enough to make money in a single geographical market that aren't based on fan-service. Asia, Europe, and North America? That's like climbing everest.

3) See the other thread about working in a) Japanese companies and b) Japanese game companies. It's no picnic, by any stretch. Maybe by the time you're employable there will be a large presence of western game developers in Japan, *OR* Japan catches on and realizes the top-heavy model of the bubble is a one way ticket to exactly where they're heading now.

My advice is pretty simple: Do what you want to do and become awesome at it. If you can do a study abroad in Uni, do that and go from there. Seriously gotta get your feet wet first. Japan hasn't really done anything to help it's economy in the last 10 years, and there's a good chance they don't do any in the next 10 years either, sadly.

 

ty i have been aware that there are some really bad reasons to live there but naturally i was thinking the positives, mainly how society is different in the good respects and they don't have all the big stereotypes we have in the west

 

FYI, Monolith are an American developer, so moving to Japan wouldn't help in that regard.

Also, Japan is the king of stereotyping. However, unlike most western stereotypes, a lot of them have no basis in reality.

 

You're thinking of the wrong Monolith (the developers of Blood and F.E.A.R.), Monolith Soft is Japanese and made Xenoblade Chronicles...and Disaster: Day of Crisis, but unfortunately nobody else remembers that game.

 

I think you need to do more research. There are forum members who lived in Japan and know much more about the life there than me, so I'm not going to say a lot - but I think you are sort of having a skewed image of reality of game development if your "most realistic job ambition" is to become a prototype developer in Nintendo of Japan's R&D quarters.

 

When I was 13 I wanted to do a lot of things, I think a lot of us did. Then you realise money, time and energy are major factors. Best to make the choice when you're actually an adult and know where your life stands. You have no clue whatsoever at 13... Trust me.

 

I do.

 

You might want to concentrate on learning to write English first. Punctuation and paragraphs are important to make text legible, especially on forums.

Your posts tend to have very odd spacing. You might want to ask your English teacher for some pointers, as it makes your posts really hard to follow.

 

i know even know i was allot more of a noob a few years ago i really need to stop my fantasy's

Yeah... and i seriously need to improve my maths as well, i have been studying in my head how my maths teacher and the teaching assistant teach and help and they are not good at all dammit i'm really getting off topic.

 

Maths is quite handy in the worlds of business and programming, for sure! Talk to your head of year / head teacher if you have issues with a member of staff.

 

My parents did, hopefully in the next few weeks i'm dropping spanish and doing extra maths also the main thing i could think of when maths would be useful in electronics is voltage, and the item's width and height...?

 

General calculations, binary counting, programming, bookkeeping - it's used for lots of things.

 

I was about 13 when I found out about all the cool things coming out in Japan that I could never get in the West (I'm talking games here...) and was amazed about the impending Super Famicom, etc. And my teenage dreams were set because of my fascination with Japan. I learnt how to read a little Japanese by myself by studying the instruction manual to Mario Paint(!); it gave me a little leg up later. (This was in an era when Japanese wasn't offered as an elective course in public (Jr/High) school.)

So my advice is to get yourself a little closer to Japan by studying & reading... so that you enter adulthood with concrete ideas of Japan, rather than just dreams and vague conceptions.

The promised land of the 1980s certainly wasn't the promised land in the 2000s, I can tell you that. :-D

 

Oh lawd.

In all likelihood you aren't going to do any of those things, because those are and will be other people's jobs--people who are the best qualified, the best social fit and physically there at the right time. That won't be you for a very very long time, probably ever just from the logistics. Become a first-rate writer, artist, designer, lawyer (???), Japanese linguist and/or engineer, then worry about the games part, then worry about the Japan part. You'll need to as the competition will only be going up.


BTW, there's a lot more to electronics than measurement (arithmetic); you'll need to get through calculus for proficiency in the physics of electromagnetism and semiconductors. Clearly math is more important than you can imagine right now for any technical discipline. There is literally no end to where you can apply mathematical insight. I wish someone told me this at 13.

 

I haven't seen this much hopeful (and rather naive) ambition since before the dot com bubble burst!

But seriously OP, you're going to be hard pressed to achieve even half of these things. If you're looking to make radical change, you're looking to the wrong location. I mean, you can still buy brand new fax machines in Japan! This is a country that does not take well to sudden, radical change.

 

i tried coding and didn't like it so i'm going to do just hardware

I stopped with the choice of becoming a attorney and creating games, i just want to focus on electronics by doing mods to improve my practical skills, get some books so i can learn at a faster rate then i am, and try to get higher grades/levels at school also i start technology some time after Christmas so i will do my best to be the top of the class in that subject.

As i've said just want to do electronics also, can't see doing electronics bare in mind i don't know what they do there maybe i should work at Nintendo of Europe but that's in Germany and not willing to learn German yet..

 

The most productive advice I can offer is - concentrate on school, get it out of the way, and see where your head is at. No point making plans, as people so rightly have put, they are often skewed and far-fetched.

Props for actually wanting to do something with your life though - there are many youngsters out there these days that have no ambition, and no drive to do anything. This doesn't seem the case with you.

Good luck!

 

Thank you! Also one reason i started planning is because even know GCSE (i don't know the american name for it) is next year, time flies in fact it doesn't seem too long ago when i first started at secondary school.

 

Electronics is probably the most difficult career path in this thread. It takes a lifetime to get caught up to speed with celebrated engineers.

Entering electronics you'll have to learn to program, there isn't a way out of it today. Everything is digital, microcontrollers are everywhere, even traditionally analog domains are being moved to digital signal processing, you'll need to write your own tools for calculations, etc etc. Don't give up on it just yet. I didn't like programming when I started, and to this day programmers are one of my most hated groups, but programming is an indispensable tool, I couldn't live without it today.

*****

Here's my story: I didn't know what I wanted to do. At 13 I burned out at school so I coasted through grades 8-12 and didn't take the curriculum or my future very seriously. From 10 to 16 I studied Japanese (6 years at a weekend "Japanese school", 2 years in school) and developed IT skills, thinking together they might get me somewhere. At 16 I put Japanese aside and focused on IT since it seemed more practical and I still wasn't conversational in Japanese. I never considered engineering for myself, I guess because I was lazy, more artistic than scientific and didn't have any engineers in my life.

At 17 I had an internship at a software company and only then did I realize that programming was accessible to me. I started self-studying electronics, with an emphasis on digital systems to better understand video games. At 19 I went to school for computer engineering, had poor instruction but managed to further my digital electronics and programming skills on my own time, and got an introduction to analog electronics, which I thumbed my nose at (since the world is now digital, or so I thought). I graduated, the recession started, I got a crappy enterprise programming job after a few years, lost it, and have struggled to get by in the last 4 years with hardware projects. Every day for the last 10 years I've self studied something to do with computer engineering.

My interest is still primarily in digital systems, but it's taken me this far to see the importance and wonder of analog, and along with it the importance of math and physics. (Computers are analog, however hard we try to ignore this fact.)

Today I wish I took my analog, optics and math classes way more seriously, because every bit of insight is precious to me now with my ambitious projects. I wish I chose to take AP classes in high school. I wish I was shown the importance and application of math beyond algebra in my earlier years.

I've since learned that engineering curriculum sucks, and that most engineers have a way of oversimplifying problems--and this carries into instructors glossing over fundamental concepts at school, and failing to associate one concept to the next. Be prepared to learn everything the hard way, because in engineering instructors are often as ignorant as their students at many subjects. You have to know their limitations as well as your own.

Take it from me, if you're serious about your career, don't dismiss any field of study because it seems irrelevant, just learn everything you can with an open mind, and do your best to retain it. Make sure you learn on your own AND with instruction, you'll probably need both to get anywhere.