Serious Games Taken Seriously

The annual Serious Games Summit is taking place in Washington D.C. this week, and Gamasutra has several articles exploring the events that have taken place so far. Write-ups include How Games will improve CS education, Wargaming Science, and What's So Serious about Game Design? From the Games for CS article: "So, how do games fit into this? Well, Barnett pointed out to the audience, which included a number of university professors: 'We all know of [computer science] students, particularly young men, who get started gaming.' In fact, the majority of students have experience of being able to change parameters or other attributes in games. Thus, it's believed that game-related learning may be a way to stave off the precipitous decline in entry to computer science departments - overall enrolments are now down near a level last seen in the 1970s, and the amount of women attracted to the discipline is "less than dismal," according to Barnett. Worse than this, there is also a high attrition level, with 10 to 20 percent of students dropping out each year."

Comments

Multidiscipline

[fishybell]

The best part about learning game design is that you learn many different disciplines:

• Networking (client-server and peer-to-peer)
• Usability
• Graphics
• Program Design
• Artifical Intelligence (of sorts)
• etc.

All of these are very applicable in the real world. Even if you work on a team, and do just one part of the whole, you still learn a lot.