[game_edu] Viability of Game Programs given economic decline

[Lewis Pulsipher]

I'm sure some of you have read the Chronicle of Higher Education and other
pubs, or have simply noticed at your school, that education is increasingly
treated as a commodity, and that administrations treat teachers as "content
deliverers", not as teachers.  Hence it matters little what the person's
experience is, he's just delivering content.  (When accreditation time
comes, degrees become the overriding concern; yet there are so few people
with game-related degrees that this doesn't matter yet.)

Given that attitude, it's hardly surprising that a programmer or networking
person might be regarded as suitable to teach game-related classes.  Another
way to put this is, administrations tend to think teachers "grow on trees",
you can just pluck one from a tree and use him or her (often as an adjunct,
much cheaper than full time) to teach whatever is wanted.

As education is increasingly a commodity--you pay your money, you get your
degree--schools competing fiercely for students tend to lie to prospective
students.  One of those lies is about the qualifications and quality of the
faculty.  From the administration's point of view, as long as there's a body
"teaching" the class (which is actually taught from a book), then the school
is fine and has done its duty to the student.  To the school, they aren't
even lying.

Loss of one teacher won't matter, then, because it doesn't matter to many
administrations whether any of the instructors have any experience of
games.  They are just delivering content.

Think also about the popularity of "distance education".  It is hard to find
a distance ed class that is anything more than students teaching themselves
from books with a teacher monitoring (I did not say mentoring) the process;
it sometimes amounts to what Ian called "automatic teaching".  If this is
acceptable education, why can't seated classes be done pretty much the same
way?  (Believe me, I have seen people who preferred to "teach" online, try
to teach a seated class as much like an online one as possible.)

Remember also that many game programs are begun by programming departments
desperate to find students in the face of a generation (millennials) who do
not much care for programming, or for the kinds of skills and mindset
required for programming.  "Close is good enough" is taught in many high
schools.  Logic is belittled in favor of trial-and-error.  ("Use the Force,
Luke; listen to your feelings!")  These are not attitudes that nurture
programmers.  So the programming departments sometimes turn to games as a
way to recruit students who will then be required to take several, or many,
programming classes (how many "game design" curricula are actually about
game programming?).  It doesn't matter if many of them quit, there's a huge
supply coming in.

Yet the kind of game industry job that least requires game-specific training
is programming, and programmers are a minority of the people working in the
video game industry.

Seems to me I read that in the UK there was a bit of a scandal about the
poor quality of game-related college programs.  Perhaps that will happen
here, but right now, many schools don't seem to care, and the
university/college system here is not nearly as monolithic as it is in the
UK.

As Chris Crawford said at a conference several years ago just as this was
beginning, you can tell the students there are a great many applicants for
every job opening, you can tell them that because there are so many people
wanting the available jobs, they'll be paid poorly and treated badly, it
doesn't matter, they want to work on games, and they'll come to college game
programs wherever they can.

So as long as there's a big pool of students, which isn't likely to change
soon, there will be lots of game-related curricula.



Lewis Pulsipher, Ph.D. (military and diplomatic history, Duke University)
·designer of Britannia, Dragon Rage, Valley of the Four Winds, etc.
·www.PulsipherGames.com
·Fayetteville Technical Community College faculty (game creation)
·Adjunct Faculty, Webster University graduate school, 1988-present
·contributor, Hobby Games: the 100 Best
·frequent contributor to GameCareerGuide, Gamasutra
·Game design blog: http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/
·Teach game design blog: http://teachgamedesign.blogspot.com
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