[game_edu] Where to post academic job offers?

[Elias.]

Hi all,

I want to offer a slightly outside (of academia) perspective here -  
and please understand that my anecdotal experience may or may not  
match anyone else's...I also apologise for its slightly rant like  
nature, but this discussion strikes a chord...

A few years ago I reluctantly (and hopefully temporarily) abandoned  
academia in disgust at the approach to the discipline I teach. I am  
(by vocation) a teacher. While I enjoy research, I am not a prolific  
writer, preferring tangible artefacts to theoretical results.

While at college in the late '80s, 2 friends and I developed games  
for the Commodore VIC20/64, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, and Amiga. I was  
never a coder, but "knew how the game should work and feel". In other  
words, I was a game designer. We even sold a few (it was just  
something more interesting than our physics homework).

I have been successfully managing development and research projects  
(including several games) in many domains since, using the project  
methodology we developed back at college.

So in the mid-late '90s I decided I wanted to give something back -  
nurture the next generation in some way - and went into academia...I  
cannot tell anyone how to write code (I am not an expert) but I can  
teach several aspects of design (and have done since, at 8  
universities/colleges in 3 countries).

Then I gave up.

I was asked to develop a game design syllabus, and produced one  
(drawing on several core texts and my own experience) which was (by  
design) technology/platform independent, theoretically grounded, and  
internally consistent.

Then the CS department took over and made it into a DirectX/Xbox dev  
course...because the local game company happened to develop for that  
platform. I fought to retain a design strand in the course, and  
partly succeeded but even that was difficult.

The students were almost all enthused and excited by the course I  
took, and very vocal in expressing that, while almost the entire dev  
stream could be learned from reading a few tech books.

I am not arguing that we should not have technology based CS  
undergrad courses, but I do not think we should be calling them Game  
Design...and until the guy who plays quake realises there is more to  
teaching game design and theory than having played a few, we are in a  
hole (or at least I am)...


On Mar 20, 2008, at 16:34, Mark Baldwin wrote:


> In a like way, I think if you want to teach game design, you must  

> also be a published game designer, preferably multiple times.    

> Certainly, if I was a student, I would be looking for that in my  

> instructors.

>


I have an issue with that - I have had students register for the same  
course again (and some sitting in on classes a year later) because  
they enjoyed it so much...until there is a definitive corpus for the  
discipline, most (if not all) master practitioners are artists.  
Expertise requires external validation (you have to be able to  
check), while artistry does not...we are at the beginning of the  
development of a corpus, so the best of the practitioners are doing  
something that cannot yet be explained in mutually agreed defined  
terms...so cannot be checked. Some (many) successful games are, by  
any critical measure, awful - poorly designed and unpleasant or  
frustrating to play. Equally, several magnificent games are poorly  
received for other reasons (e.g. Ico didn't do very well  
commercially, iirc)...

Conflating commercial success with theoretical grasp is flawed -  
examplar: Windows 3.1 vs Macintosh OS7 UI


Crawling back into lurk mode again now - sorry for the disturbance :-)

Elias.