[game_edu] Introduction

[Susan Gold]

The truth is we are a very small percentage of the user base. Many  
companies cannot afford to offer huge discounts because they  
themselves are just a start up working out of their garage sized  
company trying to survive in this economy. Then you have the large  
companies like Microsoft who offer things like XNA for free.  Also,  
things like game engines are often proprietary tools when you get into  
the studio. I think it is more important to teach students how to make  
their own game engine than worry about teaching them how to use a  
particular one. I don't think anyone expects a new graduate to jump in  
and know the engine, but if they know the workings of one, they are  
apt to not have such a steep learning curve. The truth is that  
students will always have to be getting up to speed on the latest and  
the greatest. Currently I am working with a company looking to try to  
help academia with access to research, they sell access in the $25K  
per seat arena, dropping it to $1K is a huge step for them. And I'll  
tell you, it has taken me many months to work with this one company  
just to get it down to $1K per seat. I'll be able to discuss details  
of this in short order. But these things take time and a lot of work.  
I like the idea of a way to create a consortium of some sort, but we  
need people power to make it happen. Do we have any volunteers?

Susan



On Sep 22, 2009, at 5:45 PM, baylor wetzel wrote:


> >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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-- 
Susan Gold
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
- J. G. Ballard







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