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Students Help Design Game Curriculum

Posted by Zonk on from the designers-of-tomorrow dept.

J writes "In contrast to current stories about publishers creating their own design courses comes news from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Their new "Video Game Design & Development" Concentration was the cover story of LaLouisiane, The University's magazine. This concentration resulted from a collaboration between the Computer Science faculty and members of the Student Video Game Alliance, a student group that had been tackling game development on their own time. The first Video Game Design and Development course began this Spring semester."

5 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Like the world needs game designers by CrazyJim1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everyone and their mom claims to be a game designer today. Artists and programmers can get in the industry, but if you are trying to enter as a game designer, good luck. There's only a handful of playable games created each year, so there really isn't that many game designers with a job.

    So you can do the math. The market is already flooded with game designers, and most of them aren't very good.

    --
    God spoke to me.
    1. Re:Like the world needs game designers by DarkTempes · · Score: 2, Insightful

      seems to me there is a high demand for talented and creative game designers with new ideas for gameplay then.

      now where might the industry find people like that!
      not just out of college, never.

    2. Re:Like the world needs game designers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Its just like Hollywood's demand for writers. A ton of writers suck:just watch your average movie or television show. I'm not faulting the ones that are good. I'm saying the system isn't set up to identify and reward talent.

    3. Re:Like the world needs game designers by palndrumm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The market is already flooded with game designers, and most of them aren't very good.

      Sounds like a good reason to start training up some decent ones then...

  2. I have my doubts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I have my doubts about courses like this. Games are composed out of various disciplines, like: computers science (for your programming needs and maybe software enginering skills) and artists (2D and 3D artists, music composers, etc) (sorry for generalizing that). All these things pretty much already exist as seperate courses\studies where you actually learn the things to a certain degree.
    The other part, and maybe more important aspect of creating games, is creativity. Creativity still isn't something you can teach people.

    What would a game design course teach you? how to create yet another Counter Strike game?
    Teaching people how to use directx or how to program for a playstation isn't teaching people how to create games. Besides, and average CS guy could learn that in a moderate time if it was needed.