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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.
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.