[game_edu] question from the community

[Ian Schreiber]

Right with you up until "get a masters." For a student who's interested in 
becoming an artist or composer, CS seems like an exceedingly odd choice of 
major. Let the student figure out what specialties interest them before pushing 
your home department at them, folks ;-)

But why do you say students should go beyond a four-year degree? This is also 
one of those things that I'd think would depend on a lot of factors including 
the student's career goals. If they eventually want to work in the industry and 
then cycle back to academia as a professor, then by all means, a terminal degree 
in their field will make their life much easier. If their goal is just to get an 
entry-level game industry job and work their way up, a Master's can hurt as much 
as help. Game dev is largely a meritocracy, so academic credentials tend to 
carry far less weight than portfolio work -- if the student creates some amazing 
games during their graduate years then sure, that's great, but do they really 
need grad school for that or could they have spent their time just making those 
games themselves? And if a hiring manager perceives that the student went to 
grad school as a waiting tactic because they didn't have the skills to get hired 
in industry right out of college... well, that student is probably not getting 
hired, is all I'm saying.

- Ian




________________________________
From: Jim Parker <jparker at ucalgary.ca>
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv <game_edu at igda.org>
Sent: Tue, June 28, 2011 11:31:10 PM
Subject: Re: [game_edu] question from the community

Interesting

As one who taught Computer Science fot 26 years, and created the game 
programming course and concentration in my department, I found that CS was a 
discouraging and negative place to try and work on games. I finally gave up and 
moved to the drama and art departments.

There are many ways they were negative, in the face of evidence that they were 
mistaken, but the most telling statement was from a theory of computation person 
who said that offering courses on games 'sent the wrong message'. Not sure what 
that message was, but perhaps it was 'computer science can be fun and 
interesting'.

My opinion is that it very strongly depends on the school and the department, 
and a CS degree is not always (or even often) the best route. When putting the 
course together, it became clear that the programmers on a game development team 
had the least creative contribution, often limited to statements like 'we can't 
draw that many polygons per second'.

Nowadays the tools available have reduced the need for programming quite a bit. 
When I started this work in 1999 there were about 6-7 programmers on a team of 
10 on a development group. Now its more like 2-3. The game engines and physics 
packages have really helped, and now we can say ' I want to do this' and not 
have to express it in code all of the time. The tools can do it, and the 
programmers can easily link those into the game.

In that sense game development has become much more democratic. Creative people 
can now create prototypes even, and that is quite helpful in demoing mechanics. 
My art students can now build games in weeks that used to be a whole semester in 
CS.

Encouragement comes in many forms - mine would be that you don't have to be a 
computer science major to develop games, and it's not even an advantage in many 
cases. The Nike rule 'Just Do it' would be my offering to them. Build a 
portfolio, work with programmers and artists and designers, and take a degree in 
a creative subject. Get a masters would be good advice.

Jim

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