[game_edu] Crediting on student projects

[Ian Schreiber]

Hi all,
   
  It was great meeting so many of you at GDC this year. We've really come a long way from when this SIG first started!
   
  I wanted to mention something that came up in the credits roundtable. (Yes, this is relevant to education. Bear with me a moment.)
   
  Proper crediting in the industry is one of those things that's usually below the radar, until someone gets burned. If you work on a game for three years and then your name is excluded from the credits, it makes it much harder for you to put that game on your resume (since it can't be verified just by looking at the game), so credits have tangible value. Unfortunately, there aren't yet any common standards or enforcement agencies in the industry. Sadly, most of the problems with this come not from malice, but simple lack of awareness. It's only an issue in hindsight. The Credits Committee in the IGDA is working to change that, but it's a slow process.
   
  This has two implications in game education:
   
  1) Of those of you who teach game-related courses, do you mention the importance of credits in games at all? I suspect that more developers would think about this if it were at least brought up once in a class at some point.
   
  2) For those of you running project-based / capstone courses, how do you handle student credits within the game? Do you require them to add a credits screen? Do you have any standards you follow for how students should be credited (e.g. are the credits organized by name or by role, who gets listed first, etc.)? Does the professor get credit? Who in the team is responsible for verifying that everyone is included, names are spelled correctly, etc.?
   
  You don't have to answer (either to me or to this list), it's just something I wanted to bring up to get people thinking about this. FYI, the credits committee has created a standards document that's currently in "beta" now. They have four large projects that have already committed to following the standards and providing feedback, but they don't have any small projects to test if it scales downward nicely. I think student teams would make an excellent testing ground for this. If you agree, I'd suggest having the student acting as producer or project lead take a look at the standards and provide feedback to the committee afterwards (either to report problems with the document, or that there are no problems and it worked well). The document and related info can be found here:
  http://www.igda.org/credit/
   
  Bonus tip, from a random lunch conversation: if your students complete a game project, have them consider incorporating as an LLC (that's what it's called in the US, I think they're called Limiteds in the UK, it may vary elsewhere). They're very simple and cheap to set up, and if your students include credits in the game, they will then have a professional game credit from an independent studio (and their GDC business cards can reflect that).
   
  - Ian

       
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