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What They Don't Teach You At Game Design School
The Guardian Gamesblog has a piece wondering out loud at what they do and don't teach in game design courses. From the article: "Games development requires expertise, and hiring graduates fast-tracks game development. Arguably, the release from the burden of training should allow developers to create new technologies. The industry has encouraged the university games courses, sending development kits to departments and staff to seminars. Since Abertay's flagship programme launched almost nine years ago, 165 games-related degrees have sprung up across the UK, a trend equalled in other countries around the world."
I think this article is basically saying that you can't learn creativity in school, and that the games industry could benefit from fresh, outside voices.
How is this any different from any other creative industry?
Did I miss something?
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
College != Trade school.
Sola Deo Gloria!
Would you like fries with that? Seriously, I do have respect for these fields. However, this is not the type of education good for the majority of computer game design. If you have a talent for 3D art, go for it if you can face the competition. How about computer science? Duh! Math and physics are good too. Then again, why was some random blog post on front page again?
For what it's worth, I'm a game programmer and the designers that I've worked with have almost all come from other walks of game development life. They start out as QA guys, artists, assistant producers, programmers, etc. and then transition over to design.
I'm still not exactly sold on these game development majors yet. If you want to program games, get a CS degree. If you want to be a game artist, study art. If you want to be a level designer, make levels. If you want to comvince a company to make your next grand idea for a game, well then good luck.
While you're getting your degree, work on game-related projects on the side. It worked for me.
So does this mean that game design isn't being outsourced to [insert 3rd world country] anymore? Or is that also something that they don't teach at these "game design tech schools?"
This article certainly raises a good question, but fails to answer it. If the game development programs offered at universities don't teach people how to design games, then what should be done about it?
The author says that "in most creative industries, the people from the outside have the brightest ideas and the cleverest approaches to solving problems." In effect, what he's saying is that for game development to flourish, the degree programs offered for game development should be ignored. Seems a little contrary to me.
Along with the fundamentals of programming, the core of a Computer Science degree, a game developer could need countless different references and sources, depending on the projects he intends to develop. A person making a football game, for example, needs to know more about sports, physics, and physiology, depending on the intended realism, whereas a person making an insightful and thought-provoking RPG with a deep storyline would want to do cultural, historical, or anthropological studies.
Because of the vast variety of secondary resources needed to develop certain different games, and because no one can really teach innovation, I say that all a game development degree can teach in order to assure its usefulness are the fundamentals of programming in modern video game design. A few more electives than other courses would certainly not be amiss, but learning to program is the only thing every game developer needs. Everything else depends on their objectives.
My mind is like an arrow in flight: fast, deadly, and all the more dangerous because I have no control over it.
So you graduate school and immediately start designing games? Is that how the industry works? I thought you had to work your way up, then your opinion/experience starts to actually matter.
Laughed at in an interview. Most likely behind your back...
As someone who has been making games professionally for 15+ years it is difficult to express my reaction to:
A Soch major
Who 'has written, spoken and pontificated about games' 'professionally'
And is 'a fierce promoter of women in gaming'
And her favorite game is 'Halo'???
If I hadn't been up coding for the past 15 hours I would have flamed the shit out of this dumb bitch.
Instead, I'll just say whatever and get back to work.
school:
...
Just because you can make Yet Another FPS or Yet Another Driving Game or Yet Another Sports Game doesn't mean you should.
The second thing? How to cash virtual checks from virtual money made in virtual gaming world from virtual designs.
I still haven't figured that one out yet
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So you graduate school and immediately start designing games? Is that how the industry works? I thought you had to work your way up, then your opinion/experience starts to actually matter.
Silly me. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we just designed games because we wanted to. We didn't even have degrees. Heck, most of us didn't even have computers.
And when we made computer games, we usually had to teach ourselves the programming languages from obscure manuals written by engineers who were more interested in designing circuits than in writing manuals.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So maybe this company is doing the right thing in teaching students about exploitation early on in their carreer?
Music, Games, Media Art and Programming
Heh... if they really want it to be realistic, they should have the prof (financer) come in three quarters of the way through the students final exam project and cancel it if it won't sell enough copies (and maybe just cancel some arbitrarily). The students could then try to get on with another groups project in the class, or they get a failing grade for the course (cuz being layed off in the real world is no more fair than that).
entertainment for spoiled, bored, stones american upper middle class males who will spend hours posting about how much they hate their entertainment.
I'm currently taking a BSc Computer Games Technology course in Liverpool John Moores University, and it's one of the worst mistakes I've ever made in my entire life.
It's a terribly watered down degree, similar to CS but without any of the reputation or respect. Can you honestly take anybody seriously with a 'Computer Games Technology' degree?
The only reason I'm on this damned course is that I was told that I would gain experience with the Nintendo/SN Systems SN-TDEV development Gamecube. Sure enough, they do have a room full of 'em, but none of the staff know the first thing about them. They just... sit there unused.
The entire course content is very basic stuff with respect to the complexity of some sub-areas of computer game development... You're not going to be making The Experimental Gameplay Project any time soon. Heck, you'll have to wade through two years just to get off the teletype games!
My only hope is a possible switch from CGT to CS at another university at the end of this year, or, because SCEE Liverpool are literally just down the road, I could possibly do my placement year there (fat chance, but you've gotta hope, right?)
Please, stay the hell away from these degrees. You want some serious skills that you can use, and a degree you don't have to be ashamed of? Take a classical subject, or just plain old CS. Make some games in Allegro, SDL, OpenGL or DirectX in your spare time.
Another thing: These degrees course content is all on the internet anyway. I mean literally... the third year OpenGL syllabus is word for word NeHe. Seriously.
"Third year?" You yell?
Yup, Liverpool JMU CGT is a low-requirement course for folks who want to start from the bottom up. And I mean the VERY bottom... it's only on this years syllabus that they changed from DarkBASIC to C++.
Beware.
you nerds are so cute when you try to 'debate' things with your 'logic'
Mate, do yourself a favour and try to come up to Abertay in Dundee. I'm on the 2nd year of the CGT course and loving it. We're learning useful things that are still used in the industry and so will actually be useful when we graduate. I don't know much about your course but I have a classmate from down that way who looked into both courses and settled on Abertay from its reputation.
:)
Sorry to hear that you chose the course because of the Gamecube development, we've got 3 of the dev kits at our uni and none of them are used - it was some deal with Nintendo that never got off the ground I think. The lecturers are quite happy about it as apparently the GC dev kits are very restrictive in what we could do with them, whereas in our Playstation 2 games development the only thing we can't do with the Linux dev kits is gain full access to the sound programming (there's a good reason for it).
I can also assure you that the Abertay CGT degree carries weight in the industry - developers know the reputation of the course and know the graduates from it are equipped with useful skills. We have strong links with SCEE who actually sponser prizes for the Playstation 2 coursework I'm doing this semester.
If you've got any questions about the course and want them answered by a student who's doing it, ask away
Despite what some people are saying here, the article is basically correct. The cross-pollination of ideas is what makes for great gaming. Original takes, fresh ideas... these are all essential. You need a broad knowledge and love of history, dance, psychology, engineering, sociology, and a lot of other fields. And all of these interact in interesting ways.
For example, say you're knocking out another wrestling game for THQ, and you're grappling with the problem of how to represent grappling. A few perspectives:
The gamer perspective: Press the A button rapidly / wag the sticks until one player achieves dominance. That player then executes an attack by pressing the A button again. This attack should be of similar magnitude to if the players had been simply smacking eachother around in the ring, though increase that if they've hardly grappled this round and decrease that if they've been grappling constantly.
The dancer perspective: Using the joysticks, the two players are trying to direct eachother's energies around eachother in a game of chicken. Commit too much to a movement, and your opponent can take advantage of your momentum and lose you. Commit too little, and you will never win.
The film criticism perspective: The player who "is on a comeback" or "is the underdog" gets a big boost to do a series of dramatic moves culminating in an amazing near-victory that is quickly shattered by a last-minute stunning turn of events, hopefully not involving yet another metal chair.
The engineering perspective Wrestling involves a series of roughly 15 positions and holds, and 19 reversals. The transitions between these states usually follows a set pattern of movements, each of which can be blocked by the opponent if they can react in time to the visual clues. The game, therefore, is a glorified back-and-forth of rock paper scissors to first manipulate your opponent into the position you want them and then release your damage move.
I often feel that my weakest trait as a designer is that I know too much about videogames. When a problem arises I know the solution, which just happens to be the same solution I've seen seven or eight other games employ. Pushing back against the easy answer during a crunch period when everyone has a 24 hours worth of stuff to do every day is difficult.
Likewise, game criticism plays a fault for a lot of the overall blandness. If you listen to Miyamoto talk about gaming, he talks about the wonderment of finding bottlecaps underneath bushes when you're outside as a kid. If you listen to the Silent Hill 4 team, they talk about the isolation of modern living in a apartmentalized, regimented society. If you listen to Game Pro, games are about polygon seams and framerates. We need deeper criticism. We need to be able to look at the ways in which games reflect the human condition. Film criticism does this pretty well, and is one reason why film crit is a valid if not necessary thing to study if you're going to become a film maker. Game criticism is, by comparison, hollow. That's one of the reasons why designers need to study everything: they each need to discover on their own how to take a critical yet humanistic eye to the finished product of gaming.
Other things they don't teach you in design school:
The team's enthusiasm is your most important resource. Sometimes it is worth throwing in a cheap but useless feature that everyone wants just to keep people happy. Sometimes you have to yank a great idea so that your programmer can see his wife.
Two to three weeks at the end of the project will be lost to nitpicky, contradictory requirements that the console manufacturers push onto everyone. Even if you've gone through it before and know that "This time it won't happen to us." it will. And ultimately it will have no bearing on the quality of your game: you're just tearing your hair out to keep the big three happy.
There is polish that developers notice, and polish that gamers notice. A develope
The ______ Agenda
I'm sure university used to be about higher education. When did a degree become a vocational training course?
>Silly me. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we just designed games because we >wanted to. We didn't even have degrees. Heck, most of us didn't even have computers.
>And when we made computer games, we usually had to teach ourselves the programming >languages from obscure manuals written by engineers who were more interested in >designing circuits than in writing manuals.
You try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you.
"Never put a save point right outside a casino."
*goes back to Sabatar*
I agree with the view on critics. The main problem is it's too crowded with websites with no business plan that exist purely being paid for by companies that will pull advertising if they get a bad review.
Film critics are usually paid for by another income stream (newspapers, magazines, art reviews, etc)
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
'Do game-design degrees have what it takes to inspire new and exciting directions of entertainment?'
Yes the degree I did has modules in design issues throughout.
'This is echoed by a number of long-term jobbing designers I have spoken to, none of whom has a games-related degree.'
Who probably didnt actually have access to a games related degree at the time they were up for university...
'Designers who come from the outside may require a bit more work, but the results should push games to the next level.'
The basis for that? Seriously its like asking some random person to come up with a full building design. It might be all pretty and new but to an actual architect it would probably be completely unworkable. Games designers dont tend to become games designers just by being imaginative. They have background in the subject they know the tools that are available and they know how to use them. This doesnt come from doing English degrees.