[game_edu] Ph.D. in Digital Game Design

[Lee Sheldon]

Since I've been straddling the fence between the industry and academia for a few years now, I'm going to continue to do so here. And in the process I'll get to disagree with both Mike and Ian (but I'll also agree with them!).

I think undergraduate and Masters degrees are where a PhD candidate needs to learn the skills necessary to make games. And there are plenty of places these days to publish research, including papers at conferences that should be perfectly acceptable to a PhD program. Ian, as far as I'm concerned its the job of commercial and applied game developers to seek out the research. If there was a pocket PhD at each of them, they would also know where to look.

What would the PhD curriculum look like? it would teach the candidates how to research, how to construct an experiment and how to measure its results, how to write papers, and yes, how quantitative and qualitative research works in other forms of media studies. We can extrapolate a lot of good material from a film PhD program. There is a major disconnect in many media studies programs, as Ian points out, that many only reside on the outside looking in, and for some reason many media studies people would rather build theories as to the methods and motives of creators, rather simply asking them what they thought they were doing. But others actually DO ask, DO get down to the nuts and bolts we put things together with. And that kind of media studies can be a benefit, not an extraneous nuisance that gets quoted by extraneous politicians.

PhD candidates in games are people who are not looking for jobs in the commercial game industry that is perfectly capable of hiring undergraduates right out of college, if they have the talent and a necessary skill set. These would be academics who see another path, who have the talent and skill sets to teach, maker games, get grants, and further their research. That research leads to better applied (serious, educational) games as well as commercial games. Or at least it should.

For myself I would not have realized how easy it is to create classrooms as games with no cost, compared to educators still living in the 1980's who think paying to bring video games into classes is the only way to go. Bringing bad games into classrooms (and there are thousands of them) does not help anybody except the charlatans and the misguided who make them. (Remember Jesse Schell burning that $50 bill last year at GDC?) Once I made the pretty obvious connection between designing games and designing classes, it opened up a whole new world for me.

I've already moved beyond my initial multiplayer classrooms because of what I've learned as a professor in a games program. I'm now experimenting with sustained storytelling and integrated gameplay in four separate games. However, just as I had to teach myself writing and designing video games, I've had to teach myself how to do R&D, something PhD programs do as a matter of course. Yes, commercial game companies do R&D too, but it is so often focused on tech than on context. A PhD course, in addition to my terminal degree MFA, might have smoothed my education considerably. And since I still make commercial games, I have been able to apply what I've learned through experimentation to those. (Thanks, Harmonix!)

I know I'm wandering a bit here. I didn't have much time to write this. But the takeaway is this: I suspect a PhD program should turn a game maker into a game maker/studier/teacher (who may already instinctively be one, but missing the tool set to become a become a fantastic maker/studier/teacher) who will help us to push past the development and content boundaries we now bump up against on a regular basis, and teach future generations to explore beyond those boundaries at will.

Lee

Lee Sheldon
Associate Professor
Department of Communication and Media
Co-Director Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute