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Computer Games and Traditional CS Courses
drroman22 writes "Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses. Quoting: 'Many CS educators recognized and took advantage of younger generations' familiarity and interests for computer video games and integrate related contents into their introductory programming courses. Because these are the first courses students encounter, they build excitement and enthusiasm for our discipline. ... Much of this work reported resounding successes with drastically increased enrollments and student successes. Based on these results, it is well recognized that integrating computer gaming into CS1 and CS2 (CS1/2) courses, the first programming courses students encounter, is a promising strategy for recruiting and retaining potential students."
While a focus on games may help stir interest, it seems as though game development studios are as yet unimpressed by most game-related college courses. To those who have taken such courses or considered hiring those who have: what has your experience been?
My country is not into game development (Mexico). Lately there is a boom on games for mobiles but not huge.
They actually offer in a university some courses to specialize in this but is a joke.
My interest in video games came from playing them and being curious on how it worked.
I still play video games but suddently i lost interest in creating any but i still code for a living.
I program games. I'm coding right now in fact.
In less than 6 hours, I will be going to the office to program insurance software.
If you want to program games, do it for fun.
If you want to eat, bone up on your Insert/Update/Select/Deletes.
I think the lines between video games and reality are becoming more and more blurred. There are a lot of really interesting UI interactions I've seen a lot of "serious" apps riff from the gaming community with great success. It think it's important, as a lot of the younger folks these days are learning their computer chops from games, and the transfer of knowledge is pretty significant.
During grad school, I worked in an HCI lab with a pal that used the Doom engine to do experiments on people's ability to wayfind in a virtual environment. I know it's not game development, but it made for a really interesting experiment. I'm assuming there were lots of hours spent "testing the environment" as well.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
While games are obviously the result of lots of code, there is very little that a 1st year college student could learn about how to program Grand Theft Auto in 2 or 3 courses... Pong might be a good start...
Modern day games use loads of very high end CS concepts, that are simply out of reach for novices. While getting people motivated for a discipline is the first step to teaching them, this tactic sounds more like advertising than actual teaching.
Growing a problem solving mind by the use of strict logic, and taking things one step at a time is the way to become a great programmer. Setting out to recreate the Crytek engine on your first day is bound to end in failure, and more important, disappointement.
It seems like that's not the point. The goal of having students write games isn't to turn them into game programmers, but to show them that programming can be fun, and then they can use their new skills to solve all sorts of problems.
I got a job programming console video games after interviewing with my class project from a video game programming class, so it works! My company just hired another student out of the same class. Pretty good evidence I think! Of course, in the course of my job, I use very little that I learned from that class, and SO much more of the solid programming and logic that I learned in the first year courses... On another note, I assisted a second year class that encouraged students to make games in Java Swing. Some made some very cool little things, but for the majority of students it was a Swing and a miss...
When I was in college, I was going to be a CS major, but I *HATE* programming front-ends. Being forced to make a game my first semester made me quit CS. Game programming should be a sub category of CS, rather than a requirement.
Long live the CLI!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
"Schools are working to put real-world relevance into computer science education by integrating video game development into traditional CS courses."
Nowhere in the article do I find a statement that supports the claim that traditional CS courses are lacking real-world relevance. Can we please stop taking shots at the four years CS degree? If you don't like it, then don't get it. It's only been five years since I graduated my with my Bachelor's in CS and I can tell you that the course I took are highly relevant. I use it every day when I'm coding and thinking about my algorithms. I need to know what the run-time complexity of my methods and how I can use various data structures to make my code more efficient and what the trade offs are. In fact I do it so much that it's almost second nature. These are things they teach you in the core CS classes, at least where I studied that's what happened. My school was very prestigious but not well known for its CS department so I imagine that my education isn't that extraordinary.
Our CS program offered a set of courses that would have allowed students to create games. In fact, that's what the computer graphics course did. I worked with a couple of students who took that class. They reused those same skills again later during our AI project when we created a simulation where the AI played against itself. We weren't exactly creating the next WarCraft III or Civilization IV but some of the fundamentals are there. Likewise, those same skills could be put to use in other projects. The school doesn't have to have a course called "Game Programming for the Real World" for people to see that its course are relevant to the various sub fields in software engineering.
Also, software engineering is a more expansive field than just making games. Programming an O/S or network programming are both very relevant skills even today.
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... I'm kind of wondering why nobody in the game industry has thought of taking User interfaces in games and fully develop them for other software apps as spinoffs for alternate sources of revenue?
I was pretty impressed by Deadspace's in-game UI, now if they could take some great UI concepts and apply them to other applications outside of games the expertise gained in the industry could probably take userinterfaces to the next level.
I've seen things like:
http://www.taggalaxy.com/ ... and always wondered what some guys in the game industry couldn't do if given the time to develop some kick ass UI.
http://cooliris.com/
I have a bachelors degree in Game design, and using games was a big part of how programming was taught at my school.
A lot of people are going to say "but how are they going to learn, games are complex, etc etc"
They don't have to be. A few examples from how I learned...
In my networking fundamentals, we covered opening sockets, threading to take care of the sockets, passing information back and forth, etc. At the point in a normal course, you'd probably do something like...make a lame chat client, or an FTP program or something. Instead the professor said, ok, I want you to make a game that uses these concepts to pass information between computers. I wrote a pong game that used a client / server type setup. One computer ran the server and both ran the clients. The server computed all the stuff and returned data to the clients on where to place the ball, paddles, and the score. I also had a lot of fun doing it.
Another good one. For my programming fundamentals class (eg, first class the freshman took to learn programming) they used python. After we covered the basics, such as arrays, if statements, loops, and so on, we got into user input. Then the instructor turned us loose on a simple header he'd made that let you move ASCII characters around the screen and asked us to make a simple game, such as a maze the user had to move through via the directional keys. It was amazing, because the next class students came in with some really awesome games using pretty complex stuff they'd looked up and taught themselves. By the end of the year long series of classes, freshman were making sprite based games on par with Super Mario Brothers 3 and other scrolling type games using PyGame.
I also learned Direct3D and OpenGL and wrote a few simple games with them to learn how to work with a rather complex API. Then we picked up Ogre and a physics engine (I can't remember the name off the top of my head). My final project was a bowling game that head realistic physics, and you controlled the spin and movement of the ball via the mouse. I showed it to my current employeer (I started out as a co-op) during my interview, and it really set me apart. Granted my job requires very little programming, but it still really made me stand out when I was able to show them something flashy, rather than a program that did a lot in the background but not much in the userland end of things. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but people tend to like flashy cool looking things.
I've written a few flash games and am currently a CS major. From my experience, writing games is really quite tedious and not nearly as rewarding as solving programming puzzles and such. Games that introductory-level students are capable of writing are generally rather boring and not as useful/practical about as sorting algorithms, data structures, etc...
Furthermore, having a class focused on gaming will probably attract more gaming-type people instead of problem-solving type people. The latter generally make better programmers.
It doesn't have to be a game. Any simulation is fun to create. Especially if it is interactive.
Game design oriented courses are a waste of time. It's an attempt to turn a difficult creative process into a trade school education.
That said, appliying game principles to CS is completely the opposite. How better to learn about trig than working with 2d graphics/games? Or more advanced concepts like matrix math and quaternions? Instead of learning abstract math, students learn how this math is applicable to real world applications and how to make it do interesting things.
I develop business software. Insurance and banking (mostly banking now), I'd love to develop games. What I don't want is 80-100 hour weeks as standard (pay for 30 hour weeks), competition with every upstart that thinks playing Quake for 20 hours straight makes them leet, companies that go bust and never pay you, a large percentage of projects cancelled, and fighting a perception that you're not doing anything serious with your life because all you do is play games. It just isn't for me.
By all means add more gaming components to the CS courses. Game programming is difficult and challenging and is an excellent excercise. Game physics is unforgiving and requires a good grasp of science. The creative side requires people to develop some very subtle skills. However don't expect your students to all like it or to become game programmers. That'll certainly be one path, but its not for everyone. I'd rather see this as an elective that can be taken early rather than having it forced as some incorporated part of a CS1/2 course. Access to the tools and mentoring on the methods would be useful to those interested in the field.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
[rambling] For one thing making a game is way more involved then making a website. There are lots of opportunities to work with algorithms (AI being a big one). Usually games don't have much of a framework to work with, as compared to say business apps. So you're left to devising your own systems for data and organization, which I feel is good for learning. The frameworks that are out there will give you nice easy hardware access; which is more gentle then it used to be. As someone mentioned above, making UIs can be a killer, its freaking tedious and in the real world usually you have a designer for this. Although some people have this skill some what naturally, usually programmers end up making the most simple ugly UI possible that is functional, but not obvious to anyone but them. [/rambling]
In my opinion, programmers are born, not taught. People who naturally break their decisions down into logic structures will immediately see the usefulness in programming and find it interesting from the start. People who don't think this way will never enjoy or become proficient at programming. Changing the way that you present the introductory material isn't likely to change this. Advertising an intro class on "video game programming" might cause your enrollment to swell, but I doubt it will noticeably affect the number of people who make it through the program. If a student doesn't already intuitively understand basic constructs such as if-else chains, loops, variables, etc. in their own decision-making process before they take the class, they aren't going to be able to suddenly start thinking that way once you give them a lecture on the subject.
Isn't the editorial a non sequitur? Using gaming based examples instead of Hello World or business based problems in a traditional CS course is not anything like a game design course. I have a problem with doing this though as while it may be good for the university it is bad for the students who get suckered into a career thinking they will be making games (or that working in the games industry is like making a game for an assignment). This is actually a problem infesting nearly all of modern teaching where "student involvement" is increased by making it fun at the expense of helping kids develop a work ethic*. Being able to work even while bored and disinterested with the task is a much higher predictor of future success than getting good grades because the topic was interesting.
The problem with this is that real world work is often rarely fun unless you are lucky enough to be able to achieve a dream job. Most of us have jobs that while they may be fulfilling have substantial portions that are not fun, and indeed are often gruelling*. This kind of tactic seems like a bait and switch to me. If you don't enjoy the maths and problem solving involved in CS it is not the career for you, no matter what kind of shiny veneer they put on it.
* There is a balance to be had. But I find that too often in early schooling the teachers are using this method instead of instilling in kids a desire to learn and to work hard for future reward.
** I enjoy playing games and analysing movies, but doing that as a job would not be the same as doing it for fun.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I think you're misunderstanding the OP. You find these things relevant to your current work. The OP is discussing the possibility that video games are a reasonable way to make computer science immediately relevant to first year students. Most real world applications would be unfamiliar to them. They couldn't be expected to be familiar with anything you've listed when they begin their degree (though some of them may be).
Insert self-referential sig here.
I often use games in courses. As another commenter said: the idea is not to teach people to program game, but rather to allow a bit of fun while doing homework. I would not suggest that one of my students tell an employer: "I wrote this great multiplayer game", but rather "I implemented an interactive network application". Both are true. Some students dislike games, or perhaps find them somehow undignified. Hence, I usually offer a choice, with the other option being something "serious".
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
If you suck at Counter-Strike, taking some course is not going to help you - one time a noob, always a noob. 'nuff said.
A few years back, after finishing school, I entered University doing Computing Science at a fairly reputable British University. I have and had a strong interest in computing, from software development to computer system and more IT-related information management - everything the course covered, I thought that it would be amazing.
Of course, It wasnt. Either the university was appauling or the course just didn't interest me as much as I thought it was going to. I was ready to quit less than half way through my first year, but I pressed on. After seeing strong exam results from the end of first year, and a prospectus for second that looked more interesting, I thought it would be stupid to leave. A year later, I regretted that. It was even worse, and by the second semester I just wasn't turning up, making token efforts to travel and not attending any lectures or classes.
I left in the summer, and entered into another nearby University's Game Design course. Why? simply because I hated CS, and had no idea what else to do. I did it as a temporary measure, getting into second eyar and spending a few years whilst thinking about what I really want to do. I don't regret it, for the past two years I've really enjoyed this course. It may not be as useful to me CS may be in life, but I'm thankful I left the first course. That would have been one degree I would be setting on fire in fear of ever using it.
So, overall, don't ever do Computing Science at Glasgow University.
Computer gaming is already heavily integrated into CS1.5 and 1.6 courses! I fully support expanding professional training to all versions of CS, as to reduce the number of noobs populating the servers.
The downside is, naturally, that the courses focus *too* heavily on games, and thus while it builds incredible enthusiasm for CS, tends to bring about overall slippage of GPA, and a waning interest in actual coursework.
Right now studios don't care much about game degrees, for two reasons. First, there are a lot of bad game degrees out there. In time, the good ones will push out the bad. Second, studios are full of old-timers who went to school before there were any game degrees, so they don't see the need. When they die off, that attitude will die with them.
At the moment, young employees are learning on the job. That's inefficient and dangerous -- it means they make their mistakes on the job. If they came in with a game degree, it means they will have made their mistakes in school, not on the job. That is what schools are FOR: to train people before they get to the job.
Finally, HR departments have to filter the foot-high stack of resumes they get SOMEhow. They're going to start by throwing out any resume that doesn't have a game degree. This will be sad, as it will eliminate a lot of good people, but it is inevitable.
I piss off bigots.
My CS course did feature games, tough in a very beginning of this in my country (Brazil), so I took it almost in the end of the course, to be perfectly honest, if I would base the course I had on Game Programming to know if I would make this for a living or not, I would say it was a major deception. All that we had was more game theory than actuall programming, actually we had almost no programming, some scripts in some forgoten language that I can't even remember (think of something in the ideia of Klick And Play), it was good to know what are some of the steps involved in making a game (strangely enough, after 2 years I ended up programming some 2 or 3 small games as a profession), but for a CS course I found it very, very disapointing. Later I found out that the final paper on the introduction to programming subject (where they teach C) was to actually make a text-based PacMan, and some other classic games (like Space Invaders for instance), this I think it makes way more sense then to start already with Game Theory if the ideia is actually to hold the student in the CS course, the University usually had a drop of around 50% in the first year, tough this is not official and based solely on my observations, I would say that after this the drop went to 25%, so it's definatly worth it.
I didn't realize we were all bored to tears with our CS courses.
Personally, I went into the introductory programming course at my school (as a music major) expecting the worst. I was taking the course because it was required for some music technology-related courses I wanted to take later on. It was a very traditional class. By the second week, I had changed my major to computer science.
You don't need to make math and science and technology "fun". That attitude is patronizing and obnoxious. If you have competent, passionate instructors then you can teach students.
Making a game isn't necessarily more fun, accessible, interesting or inspiring than making something else. For example, In my second programming course, which was titled Data Structures and Algorithms, two of our major projects were making a text-based Arkanoid clone, and making a text-based spreadsheet application (all C++, by the way). One of the requirements for our spreadsheet was that it be able to save and load 200,000+ cells of data, in a hash table we implemented ourselves. It was much more impressive to me to create an application that could scale like this than the small, limiting world of the Arkanoid game.
It's my fear that we would be dumbing down the discipline for the sake of accessibility. It's something that requires balance, and a good project and a good instructor are necessary. It should not necessarily be, nor not be a game. It should be appropriate to demonstrate the techniques and theory to build upon to foster an understanding of computing.
I don't know what sort of mind it would take to not be awestruck by the power afforded to one by programming modern computers. It speaks for itself.
Long live the BSD license
Yes, in one course in the local IT Engineering degree, we were tasked to create a "game" over the course of a few weeks in Java. No, don't be fooled.
We were told exactly what had to happen when why, we just had to make the Java classes and translate the directions into code. There was nothing about balancing, nothing about making the game actually fun, very little about user training (my nethack-like interface was accepted without any problem)... simply nothing about the actual "game" part.
They just wanted us to make us interact a bunch of classes. The "game" part was just a cloak to make people go "wow" for those couple nanoseconds.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
Heh. When I read the title, I immediately thought of how my CS teacher takes certain days off from the curriculum to have 24-player games of BZFlag across the school network. There are games going on today, in fact, due to it being thanksgiving.
In any case, the CS classes in my school focus entirely on Java in the context of preparing for the AP. After the AP they do a tiny bit of basic graphics work. However for my independent study I'm writing a 2D RTS in Java.
I think video game design is a good way to teach important programming concepts and keep kids interested. For instance, my own forays into game design have taught me a lot about inheritance. I even wrote a heap sort algorithm the other day. I could definitely see the GridWorld (real-world coding example) portion of the AP taken from a game's perspective. You have a bunch of objects moving around on a 2D field and interacting with each other...
I use Gamemaker to introduce students to the OO concepts. Some people may find this ridiculous but I have found it to be quite effective.
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Ultimately it's not a big deal what kinds of CS assignments you throw out there in the introductory courses as long as the material is covered well. How intense of a game can you really develop using only the very basics? The key is that the assignments/examples convey the lesson well. If it's exclusively centered on games, then you're obviously doing your students a disservice. It's all about balance early on to help people figure out what they may want to explore within the wide range of possibilities for CS.
Personally, I enjoyed any assignments that could (at least in some conceivable way) demonstrate a practical application rather than a contrived, useless academic problems. There is only 1 game assignment that I recall in my studies which came later on in Software Design. Definitely a good place for it there since there is plenty of room for creativity as you flesh out game mechanics.
i'm taking a game programming class at GWU. It's meant to be for non-programmers but i (a non-programmer) am struggling with XNA. In Game Maker i can DO stuff. i can even be creative in it. With XNA, i'm looking at gibberish. i have no idea what e does, or what args are. But i do know that the jump icon makes the lil guy move.
Programming for me is much like trying to demolish a brick wall with my head. i could do it, but the time and pain involved just isn't worth it.
Give me a programmer, a graphic artist and a 3-D modeler and i will give you an awesome game. i've got the story, the game play, the look and feel and all that other stuff. But i guess everyone else does too.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I'm a 3rd year undergrad at the University of Melbourne.
As an undergrad who recently finished a course on object-oriented software development (in Java), I feel all these old windbags who take pleasure in deriding the notion of games in CS education need to grow up. The major project work all semester was focused on developing an RPG, starting from simple movement on screen (using an existing graphics library), followed by planning out how NPCs, items and the player would be programmed in UML, finally implementing it with abstract classes, inheritance and all that jazz (it felt like it was a very basic course). Many people found themselves comfortable with the problem at hand and got through it without too much trouble.
The previous semester I took a subject called Algorithms and Data Structures. The main project in that subject was a non-robust implementation of Huffman compression in C. We were left to our own devices to write our own tree structures, priority structures and what not. Many of my peers crumbled at the thought of it (I absolutely loved the assignment, far more than the game).
As an introduction to programming and computer science concepts, the game project was great. It was accessible and not intimidating. But that's exactly what it was, an introduction. If it gets students excited about programming and computer science, then mission accomplished. If I find myself writing another game in the coming semesters... then we might have a problem (unless I'm writing a graphics library in a computer graphics subject)
I know some other schools have started similar programs - but I thought I'd point out that WPI started a new program specifically for game development/design/art/etc.: Interactive Media & Game Development. They've also recently redesigned their undergrad CS curriculum - although I think that was mainly to be more accessible to non-majors (e.g. ECE's, etc. - WPI being a primarily engineering school).
You want me to take advice from someone who thought Music was a good choice for post-secondary education?
... the big question is "Why did you have to? Was your original program choice that bad?"
At least in the programming world, you have a chance at making some money even if you're not famous or exceptionally skilled. It is no wonder you switched
Which brings me to my original point. How much could you really 'know' if you thought music was a viable option?
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Almost nobody taking the CS Assembly Language course ends up getting a job writing in assembly either. Almost nobody taking an Operating Systems course ends up getting a job writing their own kernel.
CS is not a Vo-Tech program. The point is to understand how things are done, not nessecarily to train you to do that for a career.
My teacher had us work with this program called Scratch at the end of the course between the time we took the AP test and when school let out, we all made relatively simple online games that can now be accessed on the Scratch website. They essentially turned out like a game you'd see on addictinggames.com, mine involved using a H&K G3 if I remember correctly to shoot all of the red, white and blue donkeys that would appear on the screen in various environments. It was relatively simple, but it had stuff like recoil and was actually really fun to make. Integrating this into a CS course really helped the other students and I get interested in the subject, I think this is a great idea. We didn't actually have to write the code, it was more of a drag-and-drop GUI with if-else blocks and loops with math in them but I think it taught us some of the core basics.
If done right, the game or whatever just serves as an engagement and recruiting tool. The important bit is then using the platform to introduce problem solving and programming learning opportunities and then relating that back to the non-gaming IT world.
In my case, I teach the first course in Computer Engineering, and I use the Wii Controller as the data source. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPCBfyQP4eE to see a lab where students use the wii remote in a foam football to measure the distance it fell in real time in an 8+ meter drop.
This draws on their physics, math, and learning how to structure solutions to a problem nicely.
I work for a major Computer Science textbook publisher. We recently published a book for CS1 courses that incorporates very simple games to teach students the fundamentals of programming using C++. There was huge amount of interest from the academic community.
It is certainly a method of "advertising" the department, but there are 2 good reasons to advertise CS: 1) the obvious--enrollment is down and classes have a low retention rate, and 2) since computer science isn't taught in high school like math and music and other hard sciences, many freshmen and sophomores who are potentially excellent programmers don't consider Computer Science unless it is brought to their attention in some way.
The ambition of the book is to draw in students and inspire them in the first course, giving them a sense of achievement and fun while also preparing them for the more difficult work ahead of them if they choose to continue in CS.
I used game programming (tetris spin offs) in my 1st C programming class; students were more motivated and while they did not cover as much material as a traditional college programming course using C - they were extremely well prepped for the college courses after left high school. In fact, I think they understood the basics better than many CS grads I see today (who can graduate without having used a 2D array or pointers.) I had them come back and say that it helped them more than AP classes in other topics. (It was not an AP class; AP tests are crap; coincidentally, I don't think they could have passed the AP test. I left out terminology for basic concepts and PROCESS. The PROCESS is everything: you don't program, you test & debug.)
When I was a child, I was one of the few lucky ones who had LOGO integrated into school. It wasn't exactly game making-- however, it was a kind of creation game along the lines of the SIM games but far more abstract and open. We also hooked legos to the computer. In public school; in the 80s! I STILL recommend MINDSTORMS and the CHILDREN's MACHINE by Papert - the books behind the method.
PLAYING, exploring, and fostering curiosity are the largest benefits not marketing by exploiting a current fad/trend/celebrity trying to be hip.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I've been in the game industry for 20 years, 8 of them at Electronic Arts, so I know what I'm talking about. In time, game company HR departments will start looking for game degrees. In 1960, software companies didn't look for CS degrees, but in 1990, they did. It's a fact.
In the 1960s people had the same cavalier attitude about film schools when they were first getting set up. Today serious directors are expected to have been to one. Too much money is at stake.
I didn't say people don't still learn when they get on the job, but be serious -- would you really hire a 17-year-old self-taught coder with no experience but what he got in his mother's basement over a 22-year-old university-educated one? Why should anybody do so for a game designer?
Outsourcing has zero to do with it. The game service companies in India have university-educated programmers -- good ones -- on staff.
I piss off bigots.
Working with databases at some point in your career is almost certain. I don't think a single course is all the database exposure one should be given.
Hierarchical, network, relational, object-oriented, or object-relational? A database architecture that's the fad now might be passe' later, especially with the recent meme of Not Only Structured Query Language.
XNA doesn't have any way to synthesize audio in real time; all audio must be played from XACT sound banks, which correspond to archives of wav files or MP3 files. Nor does XNA allow on-screen text in any language for which the system menu hasn't been localized; that would have meant no Quenya or Sindarin if Tolkien were alive today and making XNA games.
Why do games have to be 2D? I've programmed fairly complex text adventures just fine.
Unless you squirt out your text in morse code, you'll be using a 2D display, at least.
Unless you count NetHack as a text adventure, a text adventure's output is a 1D stream of code points that gets translated into a 2D character array by the display system. From the point of view of the game, it's 1D.
Maybe I should go outside now.
... in mouth to mouth knowledge.
The cavalier attitude to professionalism by people already in the games industry is truly appalling, but some peoplein the industry are coming to the realization that such stupid stance to depend on cowboyism for talent should be supplanted by preparing people specifically to develop games.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As one who teaches in a University system where the "feed" for the department i teach in contains a game development program, i have to say that i have seen a downturn in student quality since the game program began.
I think the reason for this is that something called "Game Development" or "Game Programming" attracts different students than something called "Computer Programming", or "Software Development". I found that students at risk would spend a lot of time in the game lab, instead of working on C++, which they were struggling with.
Anyway - I hope whoever adopts a game development program thinks about all of the ramifications, and does some intense screening of potential students.
Not only do I develop games and have done so for the past decade, I am responsible for he hiring all programmers in our studio. TBH the quality of "game graduates" is so poor that we use game degrees as a criteria for filtering out the chaff at the CV stage ... i.e. if you have a game degree on you CV then we are NOT interested, try McDonalds instead. I much prefer traditional CS grads or better yet, those from "hard sciences" such as maths or physics who have done some programming. This is simply based on experience, I have done a lot of interviews and made several hiring mistakes.
We do work closely with some Universities, in fact I am on a steering panel for one course that reviews and recommends curriculum. Part of the problem is what material is taught and how and there are various initiatives to try and address that such as skillset.org. However, a big part of the problem is dumbing down the subject, making it more accessible has attracted less able students. This works well for universities who use a bums on seats business model, it is easy to slap "games" in front of a failing CS course to pick up numbers ... less useful for industry though.
If you want a job in the games industry, my advice is do a proper degree and learn the games part on the side ;)
Gw