[game_edu] Introduction - Sheri Rubin

[baylor wetzel]

>In the end, we are training future customers for these

> companies and it would be wiser to consider us as

> partners, not customers, don't you thnk?


i realize i'm going to seem like a tremendous jerk, but i'm not sure that it
is a real partnership. Probably the top issue our school is facing is
placement - most of our students just aren't getting jobs with game
companies. This situation is true for most of the game schools i know of
(USC's GamePipe, based in LA next to 49% of all North American game jobs,
being the big exception). i don't think my school has a lot of leverage with
game companies and although i wish they'd give us licenses for old games,
snippets of source code, free (or cheap) copies of Unreal 2007, etc., i
honestly don't see any reason why they should

It's also worth noting that publishers aren't developers and developers are
often very, very small and frequently go out of business, so setting up a
relationship with most is fairly difficult. Many of the people they hire
aren't people with game degrees, they're friends and talented people
(probably without a degree) who send in a fantastic portfolio. Maybe they
should hire someone different (although there's a good argument that they
shouldn't), but they don't. So what's their incentive to take the (not
insubstantial) time to manage relationships with game schools, especially
given how many have popped up in the last few years (the growth in the
number of game schools has been truly dizzying)?

We use cheap tools (Flash, Torque, the level editor in Unreal 2004) and not
very cheap educational versions of tools such as Photoshop and 3DSMax. If we
want to show them "classic" games, we show them movies and screenshots of
them (asking a student to invest 40 hours per game to find those classic
bits like the bathroom scene in Deus Ex or the low int dialog option in
Fallout is fairly unrealistic) or, to study concepts, we make our clones. As
much as we wish we could get Mudbox, a motion capture system, the source
code to Half-Life and unlimited free copies of Monkey Island, we'd be happy
with just the game companies showing up at our career fair

-baylor
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