[game_edu] Mutual respect - WAS: loopy Proposal - The Aggies!

[Mike Reddy]

Executive Summary:
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There is an ongoing problem with the perception of what universities can offer the games industry, from both sides. The best way to overcome this is public recognition of academics' contributions. This should go beyond curriculum issues (Skillset) to applied research and collaborations between the industry and academia: "Let us build your A.I. for you Sir!" No, the suggested awards should not serve to isolate educational institutions from the industry, but must involve the industry as well. It should also attempt to heal the rift between the "creatives" and the "techies", which is completely artificial. Otherwise, it would completely fail to address the problem. 

The appologetically extended version:
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Not sure I agree with "Alex Jarvis" <adrenjarvi at gmail.com> on Mark Baldwin's response to my suggestion when he said "That was an incredibly well-thought out response, and I have taken it to heart."

My first reading of this was that it was slightly petulant, but this might be a response to probably more flippancy in my original post than was ideal. Sorry.

To set a context, here are a few other interviews that shaped my frame of mind the other day:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=30715

is particularly bad at making sweeping generalisations about the university structure, which underlies my assertation of a lack of respect for what academics have to offer.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=30968 (my original url of rant)

had me seething with the statement "that with a university it takes at least three years to change a course. If a lecturer now sees that companies are using a new language to program in, it'll take him three years to implement it in the course." Brenda, your response on your blog is SO reassuring! Dead on Brenda. All this interview proves is that there is a need for trained individuals and that Qantm see universities as their main competitor. But I'd like to go further (a bit later on in my rant) and make the case that there are reasons why uni's are behind, and why they should be (and are to some degree) ahead.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=30973

has the clearly ridiculous claim that "The students are asking for fast laptops, and all they have is one 386, probably without even the right software..."

Well, apart from the marketing hype, which needs to be take with a huge grain of salt, most well equiped uni's have far better kit than this for the gamers; often at the expence of other student groups. I know that when prospective students come to our campus for open days, they often make the decision to come to us, purely on the basis that we take them into our bespoke games lab and say "This belongs to you. You even have complete admin rights..." I am sure that we are not alone in this respect. I have just been asked to spec out the new games lab for our purpose built new campus for 2010 and the kit will play Crysis rather well, over three monitors. Far better than a 386 with the wrong software...

While Alex's battle to get recognition for games in a computing environment is similar to that received by multimedia, which also historically has been split between the arts and technology stools, we should also remember the early days of film and photography; Mark makes reference to Film Studies being taught in Physics departments, but I am not sure that this is a perfect analogy. In the beginning, photography and later film were pretty much Chemistry, followed by a period of reproduction that "proper" art did not recognise. Look at the brief rejection of digital cameras, now seen as a rather laughably short revolution. People don't consider the celluloid or the CCD when considering the medium of film nowadays; it is practically invisible. Yet, this is not the case for computer games, where the delivery mechanism is integral to the media; imagine trying to get Crysis onto a PS2 for example, or E.A.s recent call for a common hardware platform. Hard computer science will continue to be a backbone for the games industry for some time to come.

At the recent Games Career Fair in London, I polled the developers attending - some of whom have former Newport graduates working for them already - and the programming guys were pretty much of the same mind: They need really good Software Engineering graduates, who ideally have learned these skills in the context of games development; the latter was not a requirement. What they often asked for were students who had been allowed to specialise in their preferred field, rather than having been taught a homogenous course, where everyone does too little of everything. This is hard to do in a university setting, but is achievable. 

NOTE: This is at odds with 20 years ago, when formally trained programmers were the last people the Industry wanted; they wanted the maverick bedroom hackers, who could understand the creative nature of making games and would probably have to do pretty much everything from designing pixels to story development.

The other thing that prospective employers ask us for is the life skills of team work and good communication.

In our case, there are two sister courses at Newport: A BA in Games Design, taught in the Arts, Media and Design School; and the BSc in Games Development and A.I. in the Computing Department (itself part of the Newport Business School - don't ask...). We teach both sets of students collaboratively on several modules in the second year, recently recognised as "Best Practice by the HEA". The ratio of 2:1 artists to programmers is not unreasonable, given the industry ratios where content generators are usually double the techies over the lifetime of a game. What the students actually get from this experience is what it is really like to work between two different disciplines. What we rarely get is a finished game, but a wonderful train wreck that the survivors look back on as a "wonderfully formative experience." We know that they can look interviewers in the eye and confidently state that they know what team work involves.

So Alex's discomfort (my interpretation) and Mark's dismissal of Games Studies (not a name that I did or would use, as it is too closely linked to the tarred term "Media Studies".) as not belonging in a computer science department seems a little dismissive, if not patronising in the latter case [P.S. It's Wales, not Whales - they are large mammals.]
 
It is a common target to question the validity of teaching games development without the pedigree of games experience. One could question the validity of entering higher education without the background in pedagogy and educational studies. It would be really facitious to ask Mark what his educational experience was; just because he has made a game, does that mean that he can teach this?

IMPORTANT NOTE: The previous paragraph is not to be taken as flame. I am well aware of Mark Baldwin's pedigree and it is perfectly possible (probably inevitable) that experience managing teams of game developers is perfect experience for an educational environment. We should just not allow ourselves to fall into the "If they couldn't do, they taught" mentality. 

I would say that the ideal background would be experience in the Industry, but I think that universities would have as much trouble filling these roles as the Industry has filling some of its job positions. [P.S. Any developer in the South West/Wales area who would have me on a sabbatical for a few months to a year, please email me!] I think that as pointed out by some other posters, Industry links are the second best, and often most realistic, option available to universities who genuinely want to contribute the the Industry. Skillset is one pathway for this. However, I don't think that we should merely be looking at curriculum development here. And we should not blindly accept the dichotomy that the creative and technical sides of computer games are mutually exclusive and divided. There is just as much creativity in nailing that excellent shader code as there is in the over-arching story arc... Anyone who insists that my better students are not creative, despite the fact that most of them will never be "games designers," and are more likely to work on game engine, A.I. toolsets, etc, has an incomplete knowledge of the different contributions that individuals make towards the end result.

Mark noted it, and Alex asked how academia can learn to better respect games as a legitimate area of study. I can only speak from a technical standpoint, but computer departments that recognise the need for cutting edge, optimised graphics, physics and multi-threaded processing should (and sometimes do) respect these technical aspects and respect them as being legitimate paths of research; they have so many other applications and are really accessible because the research platforms are within reach of even modest grants as the end hardware is in the £100s rather than the £10,000s. Having said that, Newport has just put its money where its mouth is this month, having awarded £20,000 or thereabouts in kit to pump prime games-related research and consultancy.

University research is often applied, and used directly by other industries: I have co-ordinated two Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP)programmes http://www.ktponline.org.uk/ where academic research directly benefitted companies, with financial support. Here may be an as yet untapped source of R&D funding for games companies. That would be a cool way for academia to give something back, and make those necessary industry links.

What is really frustrating when I read about universities being behind the industry is the fact that it is almost impossible to get access to the industry standard development tools that they are criticising us for not having. With the exception of Sony's PSP initiative (which still needs an approval process btw. Fingers crossed for our recent application.) and to a lesser extent the Microsoft XNA experiment, it is not possible to buy dev kits, at any price, from console manufacturers. They will often only sell to licenced developers who have gone through numerous hoops to get approval. When asked, several companies have expressed a distinct lack of trust in educational establishments. So, it is annoying when we get the funds to purchase current tools, only to be politely refused. I think that this is one of the few legitimate areas where universities can be identified as being behind.

In terms of research into graphics, A.I. networks, etc, most if not all techniques in use in the industry today have come from academic research; check out SciGraph for example. And not to underplay the educational and artistic areas of games, humanities departments have much to offer as well, if the industry would only let them. It's a two way street. It would be interesting to hear from this quarter, and I would definitely want to include them in any Aggie award line-up.

Mike

P.S. An edited version of this rant will soon be winging its way to gamesindustry .biz as a response to some of the silly stuff url'ed above. Comments, criticisms and suggestions welcome.