IEP teaches the game behind the games

Consider the difference between knowing a game and knowing how a game company works. A player may understand every weapon, map, and shortcut. An employee may understand one discipline just as thoroughly. Neither kind of expertise automatically explains what the finance department needs, how distribution works, or why another team cannot simply move a deadline. Familiarity with the product can disguise unfamiliarity with the business.

01The expensive art of picking things up

Interactive Entertainment Professionals, or IEP, has built its education business around that gap. Its audience includes new hires, established employees, and employers in video games. The proposition is straightforward: people should be able to learn the industry deliberately, rather than waiting for enough meetings, mistakes, and hallway conversations to accumulate into understanding.

IEP describes the old learning method as “osmosis and tenure.” That is a remarkably tidy description of a messy arrangement. Knowledge lives with experienced colleagues. Access depends on proximity, confidence, and time. IEP argues that a larger remote workforce makes that arrangement harder to sustain. The bottleneck, in its account, is how experience travels between people.

“osmosis and tenure”

IEP’s name for the old way of learning the industry

02A curriculum with the doors open

IEP’s response is ENABLE, an industry awareness accelerator. Its curriculum crosses the boundaries that a job description usually draws: industry fundamentals, development, supporting roles, history, and genres. A learning library adds short explanations of more than 1,000 industry terms. The aim is breadth across the business, with enough vocabulary to make the next conversation more useful.

The supporting roles deserve attention. In the public resource library, finance and accounting sit beside human resources, legal, facilities, and public relations. There are resources on architecture and animation, but also interviewing and office management. The selection makes IEP’s definition of a game professional unusually visible: the person helping the studio operate belongs in the picture, too.

For an employer, the practical use is onboarding that connects a specialist to the wider organization. For someone arriving from another industry, it is a way to acquire context without pretending to be a beginner at everything. A skilled accountant can remain a skilled accountant while learning the particular business around the numbers. That distinction is the appeal.

03Put the veterans in the syllabus

The public library also separates resources by subject and experience level. The categories run from business strategy to development. Learning about games need not follow a single career track. The useful next lesson depends on what a person already knows and what the job now requires.

The company says it assembled its curriculum through interviews with hundreds of industry experts and guidance from an advisory board. Its published roster includes Patricia Vance, Patrick Sweeney, Perrin Kaplan, and Justin Berenbaum. Their backgrounds bring ratings, law, communications, and commercial strategy into the same educational project. Those perspectives help explain the breadth of the material.

There is a concrete trace of the curriculum’s construction outside IEP’s own marketing. A University of Texas faculty CV records David S. Cohen’s work as an IEP lesson designer and writer in 2016, focused on game business, management, and development. The subject matter was already crossing the technical and commercial divide.

Founder Greg Short’s career helps explain that choice. His professional biography describes founding EEDAR, working at Sony Online Entertainment, and later leading game growth work at Amazon. It identifies him as IEP’s founder and board chair, as well as an educator for executive certification programs and workshops. His experience spans the businesses surrounding games as well as the games themselves.

04Four subjects an indie studio cannot ignore

In September 2018, IEP and the International Game Developers Association announced an education collaboration for independent studios. The opening subjects were financial fundamentals, contracts, business continuity, and brand and reputation. It is a revealing list. There is no graphics engine on it. There are several ways a promising creative enterprise can get into trouble.

The announced delivery model paired online learning videos with expert webinars. Free webinars were planned for late 2018, followed by a paid, on-demand offering for IGDA members in 2019. The announcement described contributions from more than 400 experts to IEP’s programs. That number measures contributors to the education effort, rather than employees or paying customers.

This partnership places IEP within professional development for the games business. Its alternative is partly technical education, but also the less visible practice of asking experienced colleagues to explain everything. The useful distinction is the learning objective: technical courses develop a particular craft; this program builds awareness of the organization and industry in which that craft operates.

05Make the knowledge easier to reach

IEP sells individual education access and offers employers customized onboarding and development programs. Its website advertises lifetime access for individual plans and invites organizations to arrange a trial or demonstration. Learning content can run through IEP’s learning management system or be integrated into an employer’s own system. The business combines educational content, delivery tools, and implementation services.

Customization matters because industry knowledge and company knowledge overlap without being identical. A general lesson explains a function; an employer explains how colleagues work together locally. IEP’s provision for additional company content creates a place for that second explanation.

Its diversity and inclusion brochure makes those services more specific. It describes objective interview training, mentorship frameworks, clearer advancement criteria, and programs for people entering from another industry or returning to work. It also describes accelerator programs drawn from a library of more than 60 industry modules, with room for an employer’s own material. Equal access to context becomes a practical part of employee development.

The lesson an employer can copy is simple: make hidden knowledge explicit, then make access routine. Begin with what a newcomer needs to understand about other departments. Provide common vocabulary, explain responsibilities, and give people somewhere to return when the first explanation does not stick. Treat industry context as teachable material rather than a reward for having been around.

There are natural limits to that approach. A broad curriculum needs local context before it can explain a particular studio’s decisions. It also needs time in the working week and managers willing to discuss what people learn. These are practical conditions for using the material, rather than promises about results. IEP’s interesting bet is that a workforce can share more of its knowledge before another year of tenure passes.