HI all,

I'm a UNIX SysAdmin in Finance, I specialize in Low Latency systems for traders, algos, matching etc. I enjoy it and I love being a SysAdmin. gaming is also something I love. I would like to know if there are many other fellow SysAdmins who are interested in the server/admin side of gaming? Everything is geared towards coding, graphics, writing and sound but not much is dedicated to what's running it in the background. I would like to work in the games industry but not as a coder but a SysAdmin building the infrastructure side. Are there any other curious admins out there? Anyone know of any resources? URLs, books, events etc oriented towards this?

Cheers!
Will

Cheers for replying!

I guess due to the single reply no one has any experience in that area, maybe the admins keep out of the spotlight! I checked out the GDC 2012 page but there's no presentations up yet. I guess MMOs are the big players, hopefully in the coming years more people will realise the importance of the infrastructure behind these games. Maybe magazines and sites will eventually start poking their heads in to those areas and we'll see more information coming out. Oh well I'll keep researching this topic myself and see if anything comes out of it.

Thanks again.

I don't know of any specific resources, but there are definitely plenty of people doing infrastructure work in games. Even a mid-size studio will need a dedicated IT staff to help build the internal networks and such, for example. There was an IT-specific summit at GDC 2012 as well, which is a pretty good indicator of how widespread the demand is.

One place where infrastructure really gets hammered on a lot is in the MMO space. There's plenty of demand for good sysadmins in that realm, in my experience.

System and security administrators are some of the (typically) unsung heroes of the gaming industry. Especially for things like MMO (or any online game really), optimized servers, competent DBAs, extremely high uptime and confidentiality, integrity and availability of data are all of paramount importance.

You may not see sysadmin booths at GDC, but trust me that to be a senior sysadmin at a major organization, you've gotta know your stuff really well.