I’m such a hypocrite. I always say I want to see games treated more seriously, like films and novels, and an important step in that process is having folks study games and game theory in school.
So I’m going through resumes for potential designers, and I get one with a cover letter that talks at length about the candidate’s master’s thesis on consumer satisfaction in video games. My first reaction isn’t “Wonderful! Serious study of games!” but rather “Cripes! Get that guy away from me!”
Now I can’t tell if that comes from the way he presented his information, or from some kind of lingering old-school ideas about how you learn about games.
Has anyone here gone to school to study games in any capacity? Was it worthwhile? Do you feel like you learned something you wouldn’t have learned by simply playing games and pondering/analyzing/discussing them?
I actually teach a course that has a very heavy gaming bent. I’m a drama prof. at a tech school, so I can get away with that sort of thing. I was originally calling it “Virtual Reality and Performance”, but that seemed so pretentious that now I call it “Performance and Projection” on some days and “Projection and Performance” on other days (this drives the registrar crazy).
Mostly we talk about story spaces, and ways of telling a story aside from the literal “this happens, then this happens, then the other thing happens.” We discuss different levels of interactivity, and they make Flash animations and Unreal maps to illustrate the concepts.
I find that most of them know exactly what I’m talking about intuitively, and they’re happy to find a vocabulary to express what they already know. That and they find out how easy it is to do flash, and begin sporting a kind of contempt for our “Flash cartoon of the day.” Most of them develop a healthy respect for 3D world modeling (“This stuff is hard.”) and we only get the kind of basics of storytelling in 3D environments, but we’re able to talk about what works and what doesn’t in terms of storytelling in games.
The storytelling is my focus, because I’m a drama guy who plays games, not a coder by any means.
Currently, many schools are just starting programs. If someone already has a masters, it could be that he went to a school that allowed them to define their own topic, rather than having a defined study course. We have a woman here at LucasArts that did a masters in Game Usability that way.
Currently, a lot of places are implementing, in whole or in part, the curriculum suggested by the IGDA education committee, which was written by Warren Spector and Doug Church. This is a good thing. You can take a look at the curriculum on the IGDA site, if you’re interested.
If I were hiring a designer from academia, there are only two or three schools who have programs I like. Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Georgia Tech. I would also consider students from Full Sail or Digipen, considering how intensive those schools are, though I consider them “programmer” schools, much like Sheridan in Canada is considered an “artist” school. In a couple of years, however, I’d have to throw that out the window, because schools like SMU in Texas are really putting a lot of effort into getting departments together.
