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An Interesting Look at the Video Game Industry
Bamafan77 writes "USATODAY has an interesting article in their Money section on the video game industry. The centerpiece of the story is an overview of DigiPen, the only accredited video game university, but it also describes aspects of the video game industry in general including the explosive growth of the industry (e.g. Barnes and Nobles would've reported a loss without their Gamestop subsidiary) and how many universities not only fail to prepare students for the game industry, but still don't take it seriously. However, I believe things are slightly better than the days when Trip Hawkins (EA's co-founder founder) Harvard professor told him to stop wasting time with games."
DigiPen has a cool collection of downloadable games created by their students here... None of them open source though :P
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Some of the best game developers I know aren't CS people, they have EE / ME degrees. (Hey Jess, you out there? Still at EA?) This is something I'd consider if I wanted to get into game development and was looking for a career path. Engineering is very focused on how to model the real world and real world physics and stresses, something pretty much what games do today. You're not going to learn much about automatic control systems in a CS program, and that is very relevant to advanced simulator design. American engineering schools aren't quite as rigorous (Canadian perspective here), but it's pretty much the same thing. I have an EE degree, so obviously I am biased.
Another benefit to having an engineering degree is it gives you great distinction from the packs of CS people. For better or for worse, this has been something that has benefited me in job searches, especially in this economy.
If you are an engineer in Canada, you are required to do much more complicated math than most CS undergraduates get into. At the core of all games is some very complicated mathematical modelling - I'd even argue someone with a pure math degree would be a better bet than someone from a more specific program in game development.
Let's face it, going to a school that's going to just teach you game development would be very nearsighted IMHO. I would much rather have a solid grounding in the fundamentals that I can apply to whatever comes along. Anyone who is destined to be a great game developer is smart enough to implement their own gaming engines and games, learn about game physics and AI, etc, on their own. I would give a harder look to someone with a degree and their own open source project in one of the above areas than someone who graduated from Video Game U. Unless of course, I was looking to save money.. and of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
Most of the time those who have a natural talent and interest stand out light years ahead of those who trudge through a CS degree for the money. Perhaps this is what you mean by an "applications developer".
My $0.02.
..don't panic
While it's true that most CS concepts are language independent, I am very alarmed to see Java now being used at my alma mater. While it does have OOP features and is probably useful for future web programmers, the lack of pointers and explicit memory management widens the gap in understanding from source code to assembly, and makes the computer a "magic black box".
I am amazed at how little recent CS grads seem to know about what's really going on in the machine. For example, caught one declaring a huge local array variable in a function, asked him why he was putting all that memory on the stack, got a blank look in response. Maybe that's okay if you're going to be writing web front ends, but I'd hate to have this person writing VU microcode for a PS2 game!
In my dream world, someone with a CS degree should at least have a rough idea of how a language like C++ gets compiled into assembly, what linking is, and how the CPU actually executes those instructions. Software engineering has become a hugely diverse field--in some branches, your skill is finding existing libraries and modules and stitching them together to get things done quickly and efficiently, whereas in game programming the first thing you do is throw out all those standard libraries and write your own to save 17K. (Of course, I really don't have a clue what really goes on in mainstream programming, but I'm suspect somehow that it doesn't involve hand-optimizing inner loops or counting I-cache misses...)
A computer science program should prepare someone for any of these fields, so it has to steer clear of really application-specific stuff and give a solid grounding both in theory and in problem-solving skills, taking a scientific approach to debugging, etc, etc. I just hate to have them think that anything is magic--the proper attitude is to have the ability at least in theory to write your own version of any tool or library you use, and not be afraid or ignorant.
No black boxes, please!