Job title: Chief creative officer

Companies that hire them: Companies in the small, but growing "serious games" business. These include WILL Interactive, Virtual Heroes, ExperiencePoint, and BreakAway Games, but the vast majority of companies in the $400 million sector create graphics-based games, not live-action films like WILL.

How to find out about openings: Contact the companies.

How much you can earn: $100,000 or more depending on your experience and talent, company size, and breadth of responsibility, says Jeffrey Hall of WILL Interactive.

Useful skills: Screenwriting or other filmmaking skills. Also, experience in instructional design and management, as well as the ability to create complicated nonlinear branching stories, which baffle most game designers.

Number of jobs in the U.S.: There are dozens of serious gaming companies in the United States, and most, if not all, have creative directors.

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If you’re a bomb-disposal technician, a hostage negotiator, or a suicide-prevention specialist, Jeffrey Hall has a game for you. Hall creates interactive movies for WILL Interactive, the Potomac, Maryland-based maker of experiential learning programs, which he helped found in 1994.

But Hall’s simulations don’t teach users the intricacies of dismantling bombs; his games are focused on ways to manage feelings and behaviors to get through situations most people are never formally trained to handle.
 
One of the company’s simulations, Gator Six, written and directed by Hall and developed for the Army in 2004, puts the player in the position of a captain possibly on the brink of leading his troops into war. On his first day on the job, the young captain gets a phone call from a creditor saying that one of his soldiers is in financial trouble. That call is immediately interrupted by another. It’s the captain’s wife telling him that there is a huge leak in the house. Meanwhile, the captain is informed that a piece of equipment necessary for battle is damaged, and he learns of a rumor that his battery is about to be deployed. Finally, his superior notifies him that the captain is needed in a top-secret meeting immediately. He has time for only one decision before he has to go to the meeting. What would you do?

The company started out creating simulations that aimed at reducing drug abuse, violence, and sexually transmitted diseases among teens. But WILL now gets most of its business from the military, law enforcement, and the health-care industry, says Hall. They have created some 40 interactive movies for clients.

There can be more than 80 moments of decision, creating about 1,000 permutations in game play. A typical simulation has 50 different clips that add up to about two-and-a-half hours, in the same ballpark as a feature-length motion picture. (Hall likes to call himself “the least well-known filmmaker in America.”)

“The real trick is not to come up with different choices,” he says, “but to figure out how you can be efficient with video and not film an exponential amount of endings.”

And with so many different strands in a simulation, problems with story logic can take hours to solve, Hall adds.

Before starting WILL, Hall worked as a speechwriter for a division of the Department of Health and Human Services in 1990, focusing on drug-abuse prevention. But he left that job for film school at the University of Maryland, where he got a degree in screenwriting in 1993. After graduating, Hall, along with Sharon Sloane, now chief executive, and Lyn McCall, the chief operating officer, founded the company with their own money.

For the first few years, financial constraints forced Hall into an Atlas-like position: handling the jobs of instructional designer, screenwriter, director, producer, casting agent, and video editor, and even having to pound the books to become an expert on the particular subject matter WILL was working on.

He was the only paid WILL employee for the first few years, initially earning $8,000 a year. The turning point came in the late 1990s, when the Boston University School of Public Health and the U.S. Army ran separate evaluations of two WILL simulations. Boston University’s study of Interactive Nights Out 2, a simulation intended to teach teens how to make educated decisions about drug and alcohol use, found that nine out of 10 measures of student substance abuse had gone down and that four of these indicators were statistically significant. The Army looked at Saving Sergeant Pabletti, a game in which 12 trainees must work together to save their wounded leader, and rated it higher than any training product they’d ever developed. The Army now trains some 80,000 soldiers each year using the program: Trainees have included the new forces who took over at Abu Ghraib after the prisoner abuse scandal of 2004.

WILL’s success has allowed Hall to shift into a managerial position, coordinating the work of others. But he still gets to write and direct a movie a year. WILL produces about seven games annually at an average cost of $700,000 each.

Hall gets particular joy when he finds WILL’s simulations being used for purposes for which they were not originally intended. Once, while visiting his great-aunt’s nursing home, Hall ran across a program created for teaching patient-care in big hospitals.

“It’s not quite like seeing your movie in the local movie theater,” he says, “but it still lets you know that they’re getting out there and doing something.”