I can’t believe we’re technically at the end of week one, it’s so sad!!! Time has flown. It’s hard to pick a highlight from week one because it’s all been incredible, but honestly, if I had to talk about one thing from this first week it would be the people. The pitt students, the UEF students, and all the staff. The UEF students have been so incredibly kind and welcoming, even helping us make dinner and outing reservations for the evenings and joining us to hang out!! They’re all so sweet and helpful. They’ve shown us their favorite spots for different foods or activities around the city so I always know whatever we spend our free time doing, it’s going to be good. The staff, of course, have been wonderful, as well, super helpful and accommodating. But the Pitt students have really surprised me. I was honestly nervous coming on this trip because I’ve kind of had the same friends for a while and I didn’t know how I’d fit in to this group. But truly everyone’s been very sweet and inclusive. I feel like no matter where I sit on the bus or at a meal, I’ll enjoy the conversation, which is not something I can say for a lot of organizations I’ve been a part of in the past.
Moving on from the cheesy stuff, today’s company visit was with Glass Egg: A Virtuous Studio. Glass Egg is a gaming development company and, hence the title, I’ve never played a video game in my life so I wasn’t expecting much of today’s visit. But it was actually really captivating and interesting and there was a lot that I was able to learn about things other than the game design itself. Most of Glass Egg’s projects focus on vehicle design, which was insane to see how realistic they create the images, even down to the engine. The video game development industry is obviously growing, but Glass Egg has remained very successful, withstanding the growing competition, partially because of the work environment, in my opinion. People generally seemed happy in the office, the woman giving us the presentation was very educated about the company and the work and seemed excited to share about it, and there were a lot of aspects of the office and the company that were very employee-friendly. For example, the office in Ho Chi Minh City that we visited spanned three floors, and each floor was quiet, with dimmed lighting and large desk spaces for each individual, One of the floors had an exercise room and one had a break room of sorts with a kitchen and a gorgeous view (shown in my feature image). Things were managed and running smoothly and collaboration seemed easy and possible but not required. I’m a huge believer that no matter how good the product/service is in a company, a large part of success is purely up to the employees. When people are happy to go to work and enjoy the company they work for, they’re more inclined to work harder and put more effort into what they’re doing on a daily basis, which will automatically increase the company’s success. I think this will also play a role in fighting the rising popularity of AI, which is an issue Glass Egg will continue to face more and more of. We discussed it a little bit during the presentation, and I learned that AI is not up to the level of design and development that a human can currently produce. In fact, most of their clients specifically ask for no AI use in the game design. But as AI continues to learn and develop, the care that the company has for its employees is going to gain importance. I don’t foresee AI completely taking over gaming design in the upcoming years, but it’s definitely an issue that Glass Egg and similar companies are aware of and problem solving.
After our site visit we had lunch at a pizza/pasta place that was delicious. The toppings of the pizza were corn, shrimp, and some green vegetable, but it was shockingly good. Then, we wrapped up our language and culture classes for the trip with some Vietnamese cakes and games. It was so much fun!! I won the first round of the first game, which was similar to jacks in the states but with a tennis ball and chopsticks. I will definitely be bringing that game back home.
But I don’t want to think about going home yet. Tomorrow is our Mekong Delta day which I’ve been really excited for, I’m really looking forward to it!!
