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Fragna Cum Laude: A B.A. in Quake
TraCer00t writes, "Ever not gotten a job because you weren't Quake-educated enough? According to
this MSNBC article,
the University of California at Irvine will start giving out B.A.'s in Quake. Imagine what studying for the exams must be like!"
As you might expect, the coursework is (an interdisciplinary approach to) designing and coding games, not playing them.
A "conservative," by definition, wants to "conserve" the status quo.
Not quite. All the conservatives on the late 1990's want everything but the status quo. President Reagan hard wanted to keep the nation at it's status quo deadlock with Communism or economic hardship. Read about his speech at the Brandenburg gate, the famous, "Mr. Gorbachev open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" line. That was a battle between Reagan and his speech writers and the NSA begging him to leave things at the status quo, don't piss off the Soviets.
The status quo changes throughout history, oddly enough. No one group is purely for the status quo. We just happen to live in a time when things need changing. Conservitism is more about restoring the idea, dating back to the late 1700's, that the government should do only as little as needed, and leave the states to do the rest.
Take Roe vs Wade, conservatives don't just say, "Make all abortions illegal," but instead revert it to the states to decide. Or what sort of flags are flown over a state capitol, Bush, McCain, et al are lambasted for "not making up their mind" on the issue, when the one correct answer when you keep the Constitution in mind, is "it's up to the state to decide." If, as Mr. Gore stated a few weeks ago, "over 80% of the people" in South Carolina are against it, I don't understand how they elect state assemblymen that haven't torn it down by now. Or education, get the federal governemetn (and NEA) out of it and give it back to the state and local levels. The federal governement can oversee it, make sure kids are taught, but not to the point of, "You must teach X, Y, Z or else no money for you!"
I guess Conservatism is most about conserving those ideals that got this country started in the first place, a very simple federal governement, all men are created equal, all that nonsense. There has been bumps in the road along the way, we learn from our mistakes, but one day we'll get it right.
uhhh . . . what? he's an american of african extraction. you're an american of european (predominantly german) extraction, i'm an american of mostly irish extraction
:) The point is at what point does a single national identity come about? Early man migrated from Africa, up around the Mediterranean Sea, into Europe. How are those early men that migrated through Russian into North America "Native Americans" while we who have lived here for several generations, some as early as the late 1600's, with little connection or knowledge of family in the old country, still European-Americans? Do other countries have such a system, are there Swedish-Englishmen or English-Germans?
Since the (current) theories say man was born of Africa, you can say we're all African-American.
Perhaps we could put the "American" part first, to reflect "American with German/English/African ancestry."
Yeah that one piqued my curiosity, too. Typically any computer science degree is abstracted to the point where it will actually be useful for years and years after you graduate - the whole "We don't teach you C, we teach you how to program" philosophy. Yet by delving into disciplines like human kinetics they are moving away from this. Certainly knowledge in this field is useful for some sort of first-person sim, but who's to say that FPSs aren't a passing fad? Ten years ago they would have been teaching things like writing a software texture renderer or sprite animation. Those are practically dinosaurs now, and if you'd been trained in them you'd be back in school by now. I'm curious if they will be able to tailor this degree so that it's dynamic enough to still be useful a couple years of of college, considering that games are pretty much the only field of software that actually innovates and pushes the technological limits anymore.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This is a true troll in the grand Kiboesque tradition! Keep it up, this is much better quality than the idiots we see on here at other times.
So, how do I get an honorary degree in Quake or modification design and implementation? :)
/// Zoid.
This can only get worse in a degree program that focuses on gaming. So what's a geek to do? Transfer to Geography. Well not quite Geography. I'm now in the second year of a 4 year degree in Media, Information, Technoculture and Geography, and I'm happy to say that the ratio if guys to girls is much better. What is a geek doing in Media and Geography?
Its all about the information. Media and Information science is about who controls the information and where its at. Its a new program at the University of Western Ontario.
Why Geography? I like flight sims. ;-)
GIS (Geographical Information Systems) is one of the most data intensive applications there is. Its all about crunching big numbers and making sense of them.
The 4 years you spend at University will be the one time in your life when you will be surrounded by people your own age of the opposite gender. Why waste by taking courses with other male geeks, where there is so much geekyness in so many other fields? Open your mind... Explore the possibilities... (Try a Marijuana Cookie... ) =)
Link to Media, Information, Technoculture
Reality has a liberal bias
wavefront is very expensive. we used to have to license that stuff while I was a sys admin at a multimedia development department at a university. i can't imagine what the costs are for a commercial license.
Seriously, you couldn't cover the entire depth of a complex system like Quake in one semester. Could you do it in two? You'd still be pressed. And the individual aspects of the game (skin modelling) would be better taught with applications and systems that were built for doing just that, not ones that do it out of incidence for appearance like quake.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
As you might expect, the coursework is (an interdisciplinary approach to) designing and coding games, not playing them.
Doesn't sound misleading to me... I thought it was a pretty funny headline.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
$1 million dollars of something that can be duplicated for 0.05% (1/2000) of its selling price makes for a pretty nice tax deduction. It's like printing money.
Alias/Wavefront is very high-end 3D-graphics modelling/rendering software. It's used for stuff like special effects for films. The article is incorrect when it says Alias is a 'game maker'. Licences for their software are extremely expensive, it's not something you'd run on your PC at home, it's more the kind of software that's people buy SGI workstations for.
Wish I'd had it when I was studying computer graphics at university.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
There's a lot of extremely academic stuff that's required to produce games. Most games use 3D graphics. That requires some pretty advanced mathematics - I know, I've got a masters degree in it. How about user interface design? A good game with a crap user interface could be an unplayable flop. Colour theory - that's another important aspect of CG. How about programming? Game programmers have to be good to extract the last bit of performance from the hardware. This course seems to be designed to prepare people for a career, unlike your example of folkdancing (not that there's anything actually wrong with folkdancing), and it's a damn sight more academic than sociology IMHO.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
The article mentions gaming-type courses also now being offered by MIT and NYU, but are there many (any?) instituitons that have been set up solely for gaming education. If memory serves me correctly there is a school recently opened in Brisbane, Australia for gaming education (requiring some sort of portfolio of previous work). So what about the US and elsewhere?
Gaming is a very significant field in the next step of human communication. Human communication started with simple gestures, growing in complexity to be more expressive, systematically "cleaned up" to provide more consistent meaning to the messages.
We then got speech, words and writing. All significant advances in human communication. These were great, but bandwidth was low. The bandwidth limitation was due to geographic restrictions. You couldn't speak to millions of people around the world, because there were no means to do so.
Then came the technology for telecommunication. We got phones, we got radios, we got television. Phones were relatively low bandwidth, while radio and television were relatively high bandwidth. Of course, we all know that the architecture of that was hierarchical in nature, as broadcast media are wont to be.
We communicate to share ideas. But more importantly, we inherently want others to see our ideas, be influenced by our ideas, and become one of 'us'. This is the concept of memes, of course. Religion has very deep roots in the idea of memes. So do movies, tv shows, books, and more blatantly capitalistically, advertisement. They all want to sell you an idea, pass on the idea, and let you pass it on to yet more people. We are a people whose personality is defined by the memes that have infected us throughout the years with the (now) 'traditional' media.
Gaming is one step further (much like the Internet is, but they are on different conceptual levels, so there's no comparing them). Gaming also spreads memes (good vs. evil, what is mean by good and what is meant by evil, etc.) Gaming takes it one step further than broadcast media like movies, etc., in that it is actually allowing you to train in a 'practical' application of the memes in question.
To give you an idea of what I'm talking about: In many games, we are constantly trying to defeat an evil archvillan and his (usually of male gender) henchmen, who are bent on taking over the world, dominating the population, destroying the spirit of goodness, etc. Where there is actually a slight hint of plot and morality, this is the archetypical theme.
It is no surprise, then, that these ideas often reflect historical governments and events. Now that we are living in a democracy, and (mostly) everyone sees it's good, then the games will depict anti-democratic ideas as evil.
Games, then, are neat little workbooks that now only teach us how to think and act, but gives us the opportunity to practice. Of course, there are many more lessons being taught in these games, many of them involve something along the lines of 'practice makes perfect' or 'journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' kind of morals. These morals were taught in fables and stories. Now that we have computers and interactivity, games have increasingly taken on these roles.
I think that in the future, games will become like storybooks of the past. In fact, it won't be that different than the book as depicted by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. So active academic pursuit of gaming will be crucial in the fields of humanities and communication. So this is a great first step. Don't fall into the trap of shallow assumption that this is not a serious thing. It's more serious than studying computer science (in that it is more interdisciplinary, and consequently cares about the sociological impacts).
~svoboda
~svoboda
Practice kind randomness and beautiful acts of nonsense.
Just like in a lot of other industries, the money drove out the creativity. There's more drama, creativity, and dignity in Nethack than in the ostentatious, 3-D accelerated pieces of fluff that come out now. The problem seems to be the same thing that hit the movie industry; design by focus group. Paradoxically the games have gotten less complex from a player's perspective as they get more so from a designer's viewpoint. Look how much they fit into Wasteland or Ultima V; instead of filling the CDs with 500 meg cut scenes I'd love to see a version of those old games with more modest graphics and a much bigger world to explore.
This may not apply in all situations, but I think in the past, the better programmers have not usually had the better education. Many of the best programmers in the past were either dropouts or didn't go to college at all (Gates/Allen, Wozniak). It happens more often than not where a software company brings in people with PhD's or whatever to design something really new and cool, and it ends up sucking because its either too slow (because the programmer does not know any of the speed hacks that somebody who's been programing since they were 13 might know), or the UI sucks (you can't create a good UI if you haven't used computers for long enough to know what a good UI is). This applies to all areas of programming, but there is one game that illustrates my point, unfortunately I cannot remember its name. Anyway, it used a pixel-volume engine, and was really cool and looked amazing, but unfortunately even my 500Mhz PIII and Voodoo 3 3k (both brand new when the game came out) could not get over 23 fps. I'm willing to bet that somebody focused on speed from the onset, and not doing a cool new engine could have accomplished the same thing, and had it run faster. But college learned people often are more interested in research, therefore they wind up with the 'new and cool' factor above the speed factor in their products.
This is not much different then when I was in college and they had course study and degrees in such things as "basket weaving" and "frisbee throwing" (I kid you not).   The frisbee throwing was related to physics...
;-)
The point was to design an entire course of study (which included the "required" courses like humanities, social/behavioral sciences, writing, foreign languages, and physical/biological sciences + math) around that "theme".
It might sound hokey on the surface but if gaming is a market, how else to do it?   I can see it including stuff like psychology, etc., whereby you need to understand human behavior quite a bit in order to design a game, or history, where you might want to focus on "epic" games with historical themes.   Of course the programming is a must as well...
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Nice misleading story. Of course to report on things accurately, you'd have to investigate and read up first huh? At this point, Slashdot might be better off becoming a site for Press Releases.
"As a gesture of support for the UC program, game-maker Alias/Wavefront has donated $1 million in software."
Either that's a lot of software or its very expensive. What kind of software? Are they wisely getting these students hooked and locked on their software? Its good when its free, but I hope they know the costs when there comes a time when they have to start paying for further use and productivity.
Not to nitpick, but a programmer who learned how to program from an Algorithm viewpoint and had some sort of liberal arts education should be able to program anything. I think getting the quote from the 3DO (giggle) guy just confirms that this program is lame.
Teaching to an area where there's a lot of interest is a good idea -- it makes the students want to learn. I don't know what level they're planning on starting at, but as someone who's played with Quake source, I can say that the C source is of reasonable complexity, enough so that a CS course could take advantage of it as a teaching tool fairly well. Add that to the opportunities working with modelling and skin design, and you could build a curriculum that offered a broad range of CS experiences. Kudos to UC Irvine! Matthew
The issue here is that coding is not the shortcomings of most current games. Q3 looks incredible. It has great bots. It has no plot. It is the last of these statements which is its the greatest criticism.
Carmack is a coding god but his games reflect what he enjoys. Simple shoot-em ups. He is the Swartzeneggar of gaming, looks pretty but poor content. This is what is running gaming into a rut.
Half-Life was not a great game because the engine was incredible. It was great because it was immersive. It felt real, you could believe you were Gordon Freeman. It explained away some of the conventions of gaming, like health recharges, in a believable way. This and its AI is what made HL a great game.
Games need better writing not better engines. Graphics and multimedia are part of this, a well made environment adds a lot to a game just as a poor one subtracts from it. Think of how crappy level design hinders a good engine, like in Twisted Metal 3 on PS. What people need to teach the next generation of game makers is dramatic construct and basic fictional writing abilities, not necessarily just coding which is actually a relatively small part of the total game design.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
From the article:
The program incorporates courses in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, graphic design and human kinetics. The goal is to create students who are not only able to code and design games but also have an understanding of the societal impact and significance of this $7 billion industry.
IIRC the purpose of a college education is to provide a person with the skills required to succeed in the real world (i.e. workplace in one's future career). Currently gaming is pulling in almost as much money as Hollywood (the movie industry) yet most college computer science curriculums(sp?) act like it doesn't exist. On the other hand we see nothing wrong with film schools or colleges with curriculum emphasizing parts of of the cinematographic process including acting. People like you with their heads in the sand disgust me. Have you ever looked at the source code for Quake I or ever wondered how difficult a management process is involved in game development? After all isn't game development still software development?
Why is a course exploring various aspects of the game development process and its ramifications to society as a whole suddenly a bad idea? Does the fact that the software being developed is primarily going to be used for entertainment purposes somehow make game development trivial...I guess with that reasoning all the work done from 1960s on ARPANET till today building the infrastructure, protocols and software that is the Internet is pretty trivial since most people who use the internet today do so to use chat rooms, view porn, browse the web etc.
PS: The article makes no mention of Quake, this addition seems to have been made by the original poster for sensationalistic effect which has been achieved given your rant.
So, it isn't a major in quake but possibly in gaming...
The Dean of the School is Thresh, and he will of course name the rest of Death Row his Associate Deans.
The recommended course structure of this program is outlined below.
Semester One
Semester Two
Semester Three
Semester Four
Due to the newness of this program, other semesters have not been scheduled as of yet. However, courses to be offered include Advanced CTF, InstaGib: The Only Way to Frag, and more.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
for that department...
Well, I always knew I was preparing myself for some important post in life.
QK104: Quake Linguistics. Topics will include study and morphology of native Quake player dialects, including such colloquialisms as "BFG, Owned, Frag" and others. Prerequisites: Q103, "Bindings" and Q102, "The Zen of 1337"
Gaming is stagnating, and that's a fact. Innovation? Try EA SPORTS XXXXXXXX SEPTEMBER EDITION. Another Dune 2 clone. Another 3d shooter. I think that the game industry took a wrong turn at a certain point and for the right reasons but we're still having to deal with the fallout. Namely, when CD drives allowed massive (relatively) storage with muldimedia there was all this talk about synergy between the movie industry and gaming. The result was crap games with shit interactivity and horrid FMV. What should have been reaped from Hollywood was storytelling that is rigourously tested, strong characterization, and an attempt to be something more. 99% of movies are crap, yes, but the ones that get away and are something extraordinary are so special because of what an epiphany they represent. I feel gaming has come close but nowhere near having the emotional effect of the greatest movies. The games that are widely loved by the hardcore gamers are the ones that come closest to sports, (and that's what deatmatches are really) which cannot do this. There is, in my mind, an arena for games which want to do more. This is why Metal Gear Solid, say, impressed me from a design perspective so much. It was an action adventure game with a unique interface and play style, highly recognizable and differentiated characters, and an actual attempt to say something about the world - all within the confines of a game. I think a glance at Quake 3 will confirm that there is a marked difference between design and coding. I'm not slamming Q3, I'm a huge admirer, and am in awe of John Carmack and his talents, but I do not think Quake 3 is a brilliant work of immersive design. Granted, it aims for a different experience.
One of the hardest things about the game industry is that cracking into designing, which I believe should be a specialized position, happens through moving up the ladder either as a coder or a play tester... And I'm sorry, but I just do not feel that coders (with the exception of Neal Stephenson) make great storytellers, nor the greatest human computer interaction gurus. It's about time designing was made a discipline of its own, and there was a way for people to get an overview of gaming and come to companies with some form of acceptable accreditation. The game designers I respect the most did not come from a traditional coding background, people like Warren Spector (who wrote novels and worked for TSR) or Rod Fung (who comes from a cinematography background)
PC gaming is in for a big shock soon, undoubtedly, with the new generation of consoles and the simple fact is that the games that sell well are no longer real PC games but bargain Deer Hunting titles. That's a fact. There's amazing, ridiculous amounts of money floating around, with nothing to show for (COUGH COUGH ION STORM) and designer's reputations based on tenuous connections to a track record (COUGH COUGH JOHN ROMERO). Hopefully the establishment of such a course will make the gaming industry listen and change their ways, and we'll be better off for it. Oh, and BTW, Alias/Wavefront is amazingly expensive stuff. One of the best things about this course is that I can see students getting a chance to use the really high end industry strength apps without having to warez them. I do CG in my free time as a film student trying to learn tools, and recently pricing Maya - there's even a yearly license fee for student use. If as a student I was able to get my hands on motion capture utilities, a terrific sound recording studio, people interested in the same thing (unlike film school where there's like 2 people who want to make something that people would actually want to see and everyone else wants to make "art"), and access to some high end apps sounds blissful and serious to me.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
The real problem will be getting teachers competent to teach this stuff.
...calling home and telling your folks that you're majoring in a computer game._ _
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I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.