Tighten up the graphics! Only 5 percent of game development degrees accredited
The Beeb reports that game devs are facing a severe talent shortage in the UK, bracketed by an alarming statistic: of 81 game development degree courses offered in the UK, only 4 are accredited. David Braben, creator of Elite and LostWinds, says that these courses are a "waste of time for all involved."
It comes down to fundamentals that would-be developers don't want to deal with—maths and computer science—and which schools therefore do not sell to them.
Comments on the story are interesting, including a university lecturer who says developers ignore academics when they ask what the industry wants; a dev who points out that the wages in the biz are not going to attract many bachelors of science; and pretentious drivel about the essential nature of gaming, from a game design student who one suspects isn't going to know the difference between trigonometry and type safety after his three years are up.
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Sounds like those awful moneytraps like FullSail in the USA.
I'm not too sure where I heard/read it—maybe the This American LIfe on the mortgage crisis?—but the vast majority of these technical schools are tuition loan fraud mills.
The way it works is that ANYONE who signs up gets connected to some student loan company. The "university" collects the loan money and the weight of paying it back is placed on the student. When all is said and done, they do get a worthless degree, but the goal of getting "cleaned" loan money is achieved.
That's also the reason why lots of these places go out of business. The supposed school declares "bankruptcy", disappears with the student loan money and all that's left is a lot of suckers... Um "students" who now have to pay back the loans they've taken out for crappy education.
First, some of my background. I am the first recipient of the BFA New Media degree from Emerson College. My thesis was a PC & Mac game using live-action video called Antidote. I now work at Telltale Games as the Build & Distribution Engineer. I should also note that my experience and background is exclusively in the United States where as the linked article is focused on England. That said, these are common trends that face the industry as a whole.
If one feels the need to assign blame to the situation, it really is all of the above. It takes years for academics to figure out how to teach a subject. The art form itself is still in a form of infancy making education of the art form much more difficult. There are no standards to go by because the educational sector as a whole is still trying to figure it out. There are some obvious low end providers (most of which advertise on US national television), some programs with positive progress (DigiPen, USC), and a lot of ground in between.
But the culture of secrets in the interactive entertainment industry incubates behavior that leaves out 'outsiders.' Industry secrets, closed proprietary systems, etc. Some imposed internally within a studio, some imposed by publishers and console manufactures. In the end, there's a perceived risk in letting anyone outside of a traditional employed status. Rather than thinking about interns as a path of incorporating academia, try giving students research projects.
Obviously there needs to be many solutions in order to fix these and other problems which comes on all sides. I started a conversation on my blog if you would like to read more.
To anyone who's considering going into the interactive entertainment industry, some quick points of advice:
* Just because you love film, doesn't mean you would enjoy making a film. Replace the word 'film' with 'video games'.
* Do not fear group projects; Don't be a dick when working in group projects.
* The real key is to not treat a curriculum as one unified 'Game Degree' program, but to have a suite of programs that as a whole develop a game curriculum.
* Game Career Guide
That is pretty much the worst video of all time. Gosh.
"The death of maths, physics and computer science graduates is hitting us hard."
Yikes! I hope Braben said 'dearth' and the reporter got it wrong there.
One of the comments from a lecturer on the BBC site is typical:
A basic grasp of game mechanics and more importantly from a design point of view, discovering the origins of games in general would stand anyone in understanding how to make a solid game in today's market.
No, that's exactly NOT what you need to be a games programmer. If you study to become a games designer like he suggests, with no hard maths and science background, chances are you'll and up in QA, and what a great career opportunity that is!
Jack mentions technical schools being tuition load fraud mills: disappointingly not, the courses the BBC are referring to are at government funded university courses, at established institutions. I studied multimedia design at DMU, a large university in the midlands, with many thousands of students on campus. I specialised in games design, learnt Maya, texture design and mapping, IK rigging, character animation, level design, lighting, low poly modelling. Tuition was negligible, with a mantra of self directed learning, which meant they don't teach you, you just have to figure it out. Our tutors' main role was to assess our progress, not to assist it.
We had some idiot from codemasters come in to 'help', his contribution was to explain that none of us were good enough for industry, and that if we had worked that slowly on a commercial project, he would have fired us. Our main tutor told us to focus on designing for PCs as console gaming was a small niche (really? tell that to Saturo Iwata). One of our games design module tutors happily confessed she hadn't even played any video games.
In spite of this, I worked hard in good faith, and come graduation I actually won a crappy prize for having the best final project (this is not trumpet blowing, just proving that I wasn't a dosser like most of the muppets on the course). I had what I thought was a strong portfolio, a good degree, and set off to get a job in the industry.
Fast forward four or five years to now: in spite of three years of hard work, and pushing hard with games manufacturers and agencies, I have never even had an interview in the industry. I now work as a graphic designer, making plenty of money from skills I went into uni with, and quite frankly both DMU and the games industry can suck it. I feel like I was tricked into believing that I was learning something that would be of use to the industry, but my course was so pathetic I think potential employers looked at my CV and got as far as my qualifications before binning it.
Sad, but if the games industry doesn't properly engage with this country's useless further education then it can only blame itself for a lack of talent.
Well, I tried.
In the US accredited schools sometimes spend too much time doing the opposite. A friend of mine is an successful industry veteran game producer and designer with a 15 year track record creating coin op, console and PC games and a great teacher with community college teaching experience in game design. When a nearby 4 year college wanted to add a game design component to their CS curriculum they wanted to hire him to design and teach the design courses. However, his lack of a master's degree in CS made that impossible and the CS chair made his own course without the help or experience of a real designer.
Colleges need both the hard math and programing that academics teach and some vocational schools skip but also the real-world experience of people like my friend.
But, game design is a small field, like movie directing. The industry needs far more programers and artists than designers. The schools promise careers in design that just aren't there for most people.
IMO it would be better to get a CS degree with a minor in something artistic or design based, like art or graphic design. That way you get a broad computer education that would be recognized as being applicable in other fields, but still have the artistic background that may be required depending on the game development job.
I think the fact that maths and computer science are essential for making games is the industry's porblem, perhaps caused by it not being old enough to have developed disctinct roles.
User interaction, art direction etc. is such a complex field in itself and it'd be good for gaming if people who specialized in that were allowed into entry level jobs. But they're not.
Currently I'm studying architecture. I'm expected to have a good knowledge of how buildings are put together, but not to know all the technical details. Engineers and other specialists help you with that, and as a team you create the project.
In gaming it seems like they expect you to work from programming up to game design, which are as different as bricklaying and architecture.
On a side note, this comic expresses exactly what I thought was happening when I first saw that commercial.
http://www.threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2008-06-04
" ...perhaps caused by it not being old enough to have developed disctinct roles..."
The game industry has changed radically in the last 15 years, as the number of people required to make a game radically increased. Traditionally programmers were the game designers as well (so only in recent years do you have many senior designers without programming backgrounds). These days there are distinct roles in the industry, but a problem is that the specifics of those roles often vary from company to company, as do the paths that lead to particular positions. Add to that inconsistency the ever increasing outsourcing (in the U.S. at least) of less skilled/more junior positions, and it's almost impossible to break into the game industry unless you have very specific, developed technical skills.
Programmers in general are underpaid. You have to be a mathematician and a cutting edge programmer. Then new languages pop up and you have to start the learning process over, or you have to work with someone elses library, which may be poorly documented and also takes time to learn. It is a very demanding job and getting paid $70k is not going to pull in any fresh blood considering there are far easier jobs that pay more.