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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."
...if they go into it thinking it will lead to a fat paycheck and then they have to stay up all night writing a simple bubble sort? ...if they get exposed to all sorts of curricula at University that they like better? ...if they realize they just like coding (and can learn it for free) but don't have a similar passion for all the odds and ends that entail a CS degree? ...because they expect one thing and find another?
Last time I checked, University is not the army. You are free to change your mind. In fact, it's encouraged.
There's less money in a computer science degree now, so I imagine the people getting into the field are doing it more often for the right reason--i.e. the inherent fun and satisfaction of making a machine do your bidding. I got plenty tired of all the entry-level programmers in the 90's that created problems for the real coders to clean up after. Now there are less programming jobs to be filled here, because some of it has been outsourced, and the stupid money dried up. You would expect for there to be less programmers around too, right? I'd rather the US had its old software industry with a little more sanity, but the bright side of the current situation is that I'm working alongside less meatheads that just came in for the money.