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Champlain College Offers Degree in Computer Game Design
sp00 writes "Computer-game-loving teens and industry professionals take note: a new Electronic Game and Interactive Development degree at Champlain College in Vermont has been unveiled. The career-oriented college will offer a bachelor's degree in this field starting in the fall, and it's the first degree of its kind in the region." While academic programs for game development aren't new, they're still far from being a standard course offering. It's cool to see that they're catching on.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Well, it would theoretically be better than something like computer science, right?
...is that they sort of leaked the information about this in mid-April, when the college selection process is supposed to be nearly done. As a result, we're thrown into another round of decision turmoil, with a deposit at one university and an acceptance at Champlain.
It sounds as if Champlain is working with industry on this program, and will certainly do all they can to help their first graduating classes get placed. But aren't game jobs pretty much game-to-game, like the Star Trek: Elite Force 2 folks who got laid off at Raven right after the game went gold?
How generally versatile will a game design degree be, anyway. I suspect careful choice of electives will be the key.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
On the other hand, I know the military is big on hiring games theory people for their warfare sims. I don't suppose this would help in that department however unless they gave a serious background in that area.
Again, the problem is that the number of warfare simulator developers really is quite small in the grand scheme of things. The reason I am a little peeved by all these high-profile things like game development/space missions/rock stars is that it creates a lot of wannabes to don't realize they need passion first, then smarts. A person shouldn't go into aerospace engineering, for example, if they have no first-hand experience with airplanes. Watching documentaries or reading Popular Mechanics just doesn't cut it.
I would hope that the number of people who enroll in Game Design is a very small group of dedicated people. Unfortunately, I know that a lot of people will probably enroll...you know the Uni knows that too ($$$)..., when most of those kids really just need to get a general-purpose degree in business and go out and get a real job and raise a real family and be satisfied.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Here's a column I wrote a day ago about this subject for the Stanford Daily:
Video Game Studies
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
The worst thing that can happen is that a whole new subfield of Computer Science based on game design emerges that tries to quantify everything with theory and abstract principles.