[game_edu] Brenda Braithwaite's game_edu rant at GDC

[Ian Schreiber]

Personally, I take Brenda's rant in context. It's a rant session, not an 
information session. One method of making a solid rant is to take a 
black-and-white, polarizing view to its logical extreme for the purpose of 
sparking discussion. Judging by the traffic on this list, I would say she has 
succeeded admirably.

Reading between the lines, then, we have to dial things back a little. What are 
the real takeaways here? This is my interpretation:

1) Entry-level game design positions in the game industry are rare to  begin 
with, and supply of candidates is MUCH greater than demand. Who  are our 
graduates competing with for jobs? Well, I got my first game  design job by 
applying for an entry-level position after 3 years  industry experience as a 
gameplay programmer/scripter, following 4 years  programming experience outside 
the industry, so I assume my students  are competing with people of my caliber. 
More to the point, for every  student of yours who is a design superstar, there 
are ten other design  superstars out there applying for the same position who 
also know  programming, so the odds are stacked against. Does it happen, that a  
game design student (without programming) will get a game design job?  Sure it 
does -- it happened to Brenda, it has happened to some of her  students, it 
happened to some of my students, it probably happens for  some of yours. But the 
thing to realize is that this is the exception,  not the rule. The students that 
get these jobs are outliers. And  constructing an entire curriculum designed for 
outliers is criminal,  assuming you are promoting your school to prospective 
students as a way  to get an industry job as a game designer. If your marketing 
even  vaguely implies this, you owe it to your students to either fix your  
curriculum so your students are actually competitive, or to fix your  marketing 
so you make it clear that this degree has near-zero vocational  value.

2) Programming is useful for a game designer. A designer who understands code 
can use that knowledge to inform their designs. I can say this from my own 
experience (I have a CS background along with design experience): as a designer 
I have saved my programming team months of coding simply by slightly tweaking a 
design from something that is nearly impossible to code, to something that is 
nearly trivial. And as a programmer, I have used my understanding of the 
scripting system used in an engine to suggest new mechanics to the design team 
that were compelling, deep, and easy to implement. Knowing code is a valuable 
skill.

3) Design and programming are strongly linked (perhaps moreso than other 
disciplines). Particularly for systems design, what designers do is write 
documents that tell the programmers what to do. A "pure" designer working with a 
"pure" programmer leads to miscommunication and chaos. If the designer doesn't 
know code, then that forces the programmer to have a good natural talent for 
design, which limits the teams that designer can work with.

Also it's important to remember that Brenda is specifically talking about 
entry-level designers, not designers in general, because the competition for 
entry-level positions is just too great. The fact that Brenda is just learning 
to code now is thus irrelevant to her core argument.

- Ian



      
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