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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.
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.