Slashdot Mirror
The Top 10 Gaming Colleges
Pluvius writes "The top-ten list of party schools published by the Princeton Review every year has always been a popular metric among prospective American college students for determining the 'most compatible' university to attend. Because of this, the Global Gaming League has come up with a more geek-oriented list: The First Annual Top Gaming Colleges Survey. The entries were selected based on such factors as proximity to gamer meccas such as Southern California, the frequency of LAN parties, and the existence and strength of a game design curriculum. Here's an excerpt from the number one entry, UT/Austin: 'Last, if you don't feel like leaving your dorm, there's nothing to worry about. A blistering Internet connection will give you LAN pings inside Texas, 30 milliseconds of latency to the East coast and 40 to the West coast. "The Internet connection at the dorms is ****ing amazing. I was [on it] freshman year; I miss that part about moving out of the dorms."'"
Try this: http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3900
here's the right one: http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3900
gg
So this is a reason I shouldn't go to UVA? Because I "won't have time to game?" What a trite article. Maybe you should go to a university because it will give you a competitive education, not because you can ping 9ms to your favorite server?
Execute? [Y/N] _
It is already a top 10 party school and has a great football team and about 50,000 students. Since all the non-techies can just get drunk, the techies can start their anti-scial isolation training right in college by never leaving their dorn rooms. Wonder if they offer a degree in slashdotting?
[CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
Why, sonny, I remember back in my days when deciding on a college was a balance between how much it cost and how good the college was for the field of study you wanted. You went to college with a priority on learning. We didn't have none of these newfangled college decision making thingys that were all about partying and maybe getting a token diploma after spending four years and thousands of dollars, dagnabbit!
What's that? You're joining Delta Tau Chi? Well, that makes a bit more sense.
[/CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I can see really intelligent parents getting a hold of this list and starting to shift kids away from campuses where gaming is a little too friendly. Don't give them information they don't need to see!
Though, I'd rather have my kid at a school where gaming was damn easy, as opposed to a school where drinking was the only thing to do every day.
When I was in college, we had a very nice tub... pipe to the Internet :) Back in 98-99 I believe we leased part of a T3.
What stunk is we were blocked from playing games on the Internet. This was back during Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Quake III, days. They blocked ports, UDP, you name it. It really stunk.
The LAN Gaming was great, particularly since you often knew the person you were playing against so I didn't mind THAT much. However, after I moved offcampus my senior year I found out that they took things a step further. They started blocking traffic between each dorm, meaning you could only play against people in your own dorm. When I asked what their reasons were, my friends just shrugged.
I don't know what the state of affairs is there now, for all I know they've opened up Internet gaming again. But it was a shame that a school ranked so highly for "being wired" that they took such steps. I know, I know... I wasn't going there to play games. But I did pretty well in school (later got my Masters) so it's not like I was a complete slacker.
The top-ten list of party schools published by the Princeton Review every year has always been a popular metric among prospective American college students for determining the 'most compatible' university to attend.
Any correlation with the decline of the sciences in the USA?
"The Internet connection at the dorms is ****ing amazing."
Nice to see college is really enhancing his vocabulary.
Don't mind me. I've become and old curmudgeon.
Well let's see. Between school itself (and the associated homework)*, plus the job you'll need to pay for it all. Were does one find the time to game?
*And let's mention the fact that the student population is getting older and have family responsabilities.
Actually RIT is great for general geekery. For a while though we nearly had 2 different groups almost competing for who could hold the best campus LAN. One of them ended up having a LAN party about every 2 weeks for most of the year, giving out insane prizes, until it ran their budget into the ground. So now electronic gaming society only has LANs once in a while, and we have RITfest twice a year which has been consistently pretty big and usually pretty fun. EGS still meets once a week (with an occasional special event or tournament) for console gaming. And then of course theres RWAG for D&D and tabletop... and we have a Go club, and Anime club is actually the largest club on campus. And we have an OC3 (although thats for the whole school). So yeah, yay for geeks and gamers!
Well, just look at this... Didn't I tell you?
I would've tested the ping time, but I had other weird interests taking most of my time; crazy stuff like classes, studying and trying to get girls! ha ha.
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Platt College, with three locations in Southern California and a comprehensive curriculum focused on game content creation and portfolio work. One of the only colleges with a full motion capture studio.
Cogswell Polytechnic College, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, lots of big names and a friendly culture. Been around since 1887. I went there, in fact.
Oh, wait, you guys meant slacker colleges, not actual college for learning how to make actual games.
In South Korea, even old people know how to program games. No wonder we're falling behind.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
They rated geography as important, and gave RIT a one. Then they slam Rochester, saying there's nothing to do? Not true.. there's plenty of things to do in Rochester. Even better, its not far from Geneseo. Some of us actually prefer Rochester's climate over Austins or Tampas!
To the best of my knowledge, the pipe for UT-Austin is a couple of 'commodity-Internet' OC3s leased from a lone carrier (Qwest). Using the 95th percentile on UTNet's 'busy days', inbound traffic hits around ~350 Mbps. Another thing to note is that the Internet2 uplink for UT-Austin is a Qwest OC12 (either it is or will be a GigE connection to I2 in the near future). Commodity-Internet is somewhat saturated, but decent. The big win is the I2 uplink being blazing (fast and fairly not saturated).
One of the things I experienced as a student in the dorms at UT-Austin (2000-2001) was the leveraging of a throughput quota on ResNet ports. I believe they alotted activated-for-pay ports six gigs of throughput in a given calendar week. Today, things have changed slightly:
So thats a big negative for all the 18-year old network gobblers out there who play GAMEZ and swap FILEZ.
So we are National Champions _and_ Gaming Gods? Sweet. ;)
They obviously didn't try very hard to get their results. I'm president of a Student Organization at Vanderbilt University. We have a gaming culture on campus, including 1 large (120+) person LAN per semester and weekly gaming nights. We're just about to bring a 64-man Counter-strike server on campus that the university is officially sponsoring. But I wasn't even CONTACTED by the people who wrote the article.
I went to the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) for several years and during that whole time they were focused on their new "Gaming" program. Basically it boiled down to a "Degree of This with an emphasis in Game Design." The emphasis, of course, was basic gaming classes related to making and designing a game or the most part. If motivated and interested, you were able to work on a mod project which may or may not ever be completed. Level design and game theory classes would always fill up quick, but they were generally worthless.
I entered the school because of its game design aspects, but not the actual game degree, it did not exists at that point(It came the next fall.) I started to take some Game classes and realized it was a huge joke. They were teaching things that would never help you get a job in the industry. How to make a Game Doc, Theories on Level Design, and assorted design classes. The problem is that nobody is going to get a job as a designer out of college, especially a designer with no working/active games being played by anyone. I realized I picked a bad school and decided to work my way out of the jam. I switch degrees to Software Engineering and focused on web design. I opted out of the 4 years degree and went with the 2 years program so I could get out faster. UAT will not transfer credits, so this was my fastest "out".
During my year and a half of getting out, I saw the school change to a primary game design school, pulling in their largest classes ever for this degree. They were blinded by the money and all but neglected the other programs, which were good but in need of funding to keep them above par, which they promised to do.
I ended up doing very well for myself and actually had some professors to look up to in the end. I missed out on the whole "University" life, but made up for it after I left. I managed to find a great job soon after college as a web designer, but no thanks to my schooling. I switched to web design so I could get a piece of paper to tell everyone else that I knew what I was talking about.. I already knew everything I needed, but I needed to leave with a degree.
Still though, for how much they poured into the Game program at UAT, I expected them to be on this list for sure. Especially when they claim to have connections all throughout the gaming industry...
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I realize that NBCC-Miramichi might be a little on the obscure side, since it's both quite small and located in Atlantic Canada, but I understand that their Electronic Game Design was one of the very first gaming-specific programs offered anywhere, and was a little disappointed to see no mention of it at all in the article. It's short (two year) and very focused, with a high dropout rate (~50%), but for those willing to seriously dedicate themselves (which is a requirement for getting into the game industry anyway!), it is a very rewarding experience. Graduates of the program have been scooped up right after graduation (sometimes even before) by some fairly well-known companies, and others have gone on to create their own successful (if small) development studios. As a graduate who has gone on to a have a fairly successful career in the gaming industry, I can definately recommend the program, especially considering that it's also quite affordable as far as education goes.
I game, therefore I am...
...since the early 90's when I would get booted out of Moria on the VAX at 8am when the professor's started loggin in to check email.
I forgot what I wanted to say, but honestly, it was important.
Huh, And here I thought it was going to be an article on top schools to learn how to make games. This article just seems silly when you are expecting something like that.
Well that article will have to show up eventually.
Because no /. college story is complete without some snide remark about the greek system.
Wow. Total cluelessness reigns supreme. You need to start watching some classic, frat house comedies.
It's a reference to the Delta House in the movie Animal House. Looks like my statement about "how long ago it seems" was more accurate than I thought.
Sheesh. { roll eyes }
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The Delta Tau Chi house is the "party frat" that was the basis for the movie "Animal House". You're a college student and you didn't at least know THAT? I would have thought by now that universities would make that movie required viewing for how NOT to behave on campus. :)
I've seen the gaming scene here enough to KNOW it rocks. ^_^
So not only is UT the #1 Party school according to the Princeton Review, it's also the #1 Gaming school, how amusing.
1) We've got some of the most gorgeous women on the planet.
2) 5th drunkest city in the USA
3) Live music capital of the USA (possibly the world)
4) South by Southwest Festival(s)
5) We have a homeless celebrity dragqueen who runs for mayor as often as possible.
And now we can add #6: Best gaming college in the nation.
I love this city.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein