Visiting Playkot

After the meeting with Ilya Pshenichny within the day of the profession at HSE, many students of the Bachelor programme Sociology and Social Informatics, entrants and participants of the Research Group were invited to the Playkot office. Playkot is the third largest game studio in Russia. It comes up with games for Vkontakte, Facebook and smartphones. Ilya Pshenichny, director of business development in Playkot, told about the projects of the studio, the game industry in Russia and the game development process.

Ilya conducted an excursion around the office, where employees work on Playkot projects. He also told, who are needed to create the game: game designers, programmers, artists, testers and others. Usually, producing the new game is a team work and collaborative process. If the idea of the game is good, a team for developing this game is created. There were a lot of questions about what programming language does Playkot use for writing games, how much it costs to develop one game and how much revenue it can bring.

Ilya also discussed, how sociology helps in the design and support of games. Playkot employees work on social games, where interaction between people is an important part of the game process. To understand how social life should be organized in the game, knowledge about the social life of people in a real society is necessary.

On the educational program "Sociology and Social Informatics" students receive such knowledge and learn to apply them in research and applied tasks. Already in the first year students get acquainted with the basics of developing applications and games. While senior students study the Internet and virtual economy and social interaction on the Internet. In order to use this knowledge in practice, they get skills of analysis and data processing, get acquainted with the basics of linear algebra and mathematical analysis.