UK Industry Group Boss: Study Arts So Games Are Not Designed By 'Spotty Nerds'

nickweller writes: John Cridland is the leader of the Confederation of British Industry, a group that represents over 100,000 UK businesses. In a recent interview, he spoke about his enthusiasm for adding arts education to more traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs. Here's how he chose to express that: "One of the biggest growth industries in Britain today is the computer games industry. We need extra coders — dozens and dozens of them but nobody is going to play a game designed by a spotty nerd. We need people with artistic flair." Cridland also expressed support for an increased emphasis on foreign language education: "If we’re not capable of speaking other people’s languages, we’re going to be in difficulties. However, there is far too much emphasis placed on teaching French and German. The language we most need going forward is Spanish (the second most frequently spoken language in the world). That and a certain percentage need to learn Mandarin to develop relations with China."

Comments

Re:No thanks

[iluvcapra]

Game art is already designed by designers and artists. Game music is composed by musicians and composers.

Don't waste your time studying art, just hire artists!

Game design is created by people who understand that mere game art and music alone does not make a good game.

What part of game "design" isn't art, exactly? This is an interesting perspective: programmers make games, and they subcontract all the "Art" out to vendors. I've done sound design for some video games so I definitely run into this perspective a lot, I think it's kinda sick and it sorta denies the essential creative act of making a game.

Basically you have a bunch of artists making stuff, and then you present your work to developers and the PMs, and uniformly, I've found the devs are totally inarticulate, and either don't really know what they want, and they are totally unoriginal and if you let them do whatever they wanted, they'd just have you remake all the Titanfall assets in different colors (or with more reverb and low-end). Dev don't communicate, they never want to talk to you, they got no vision for how they want this game to be different from every other one, and to them, the "artists" are just columns on a spreadsheet.