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When I entered the room, I noticed that a coalition from Electronic Arts had enveloped nearly half the table. A quick glance outside told me that a conference entitled "Practical Game Theories: Academics Fragging Developers" had taken place the hour before.
I wondered if EA was here to exact revenge.
The moderator (substituting for an absent Eric Zimmerman, who was supposed to have led the session) launched with a description of the classes he taught and the tools they were using (specifically 3D Game Studio, with its low licensing fee). He referenced a few other 3d game development packages, but then he mentioned the $20 student license fee.
"Oh," said the collective.
After a bit of off-topic banter, someone mentioned panda3d.org as the home of an open-source 3d engine used by Disney. If you want to know the entire story, it "requires a few beers;" with luck, by the end of this week, enough beers will have accomplished the task.
(editor’s note: as of 3/26, there weren't enough beers.)
Eric Todd from Maxis questioned the importance of such experience. During the recruiting and employment process, he told how he was looking for fundamentals rather than package training. Once you enter a company, he said, developers tend to work with proprietary software anyway. His position was that technology will always change, but fundamentals will always be in relevant.
When asked what those fundamentals were, he offered linear algebra. There was some nodding and a bit of coughing in response.
A student at the Rochester Institute of Technology mentioned that athough he is very interested in games, he doesn't take game-related courses because they all focus on completing large projects. Instead, he wants to see courses that center around problem-solving and specifics. A few seemed to agree with this stance, but noted a place for large project-focused courses at both the beginning and the end of a curriculum.
There was unanimous agreement, around the room, that video game history is essential. One thing that is not essential, however, is for universities to ask developers what tools to use in their curriculum; what they should be asking, said one member of the EA coalition, is what values companies need in their staff.
Then there was the manifest exasperation with marketing. One freelance developer mentioned a question he received from his publisher's marketing department: "if your game was a shoe, what would it be?" This elicited a few laughs.
One professor of games design from Washington stood up and wondered why today's game students have such trouble understanding game design. They may know their 3d engines, and they may be good game players, yet from his experience they are going into class and just not seeing the design of a game.
Gonzalo Frasca, who led the room's previous roundtable on practical game theory, suggested that schools need to take risks in instilling and teaching innovative design. "Perhaps," he offered, "the universities can drive the industry into creating more innovative products."
A freelance developer from Canada offered the idea that genre itself is a curriculum. Being able to work with the full scope of existing genres, he insisted, means being ready for an industry that is drawing upon aspects of all genres to create new play concepts.
One of the few students in the room asked if video game design is a curriculum more appropriate to a university, or to a trade school, like Full Sail. Everyone seemed to agree that the tradition and culture of video games goes far beyond what trade schools can offer. Many developers seemed less than thrilled with people who came through trade schools. One person described them as thinking they have the right to a job because they have a paper saying they know C++. "Beat the arrogance out of them!" EA suggested. Here, the developers agreed that universities are very appropriate for this task. EA also opined that schools should give students "the smackdown"; show them the reality of the games industry and penalize foolishness and mistakes early on, so that companies don't have to pay for it later.
At this point, a professor from the University of Montreal mentioned that Canadian universities have an advantage over US schools in their tradition of strong internship and co-op deals with companies. Besides the exposure that interns receive for their own sake, their experiences also allow them to teach professors and other students. One developer asked if interns are useful for programming positions, considering the importance of maintaining the core of programmers throughout a development project; the EA coalition responded by saying that even over a short three-month span, their programming interns deliver "strong value" about seventy-five percent of the time.
Then came the question of degrees. Are undergraduate degrees in game design useful? Most in the room were undecided on the issue. The Electronic Arts developers agreed that there was value in a Master of Fine Arts degree in game design, because earning one entails building specialty skills on top of the core fundamentals learned as an undergrad. Many also agreed on the effectiveness of video game minors in supplementing other degrees, such as computer science or art. Game design on its own, however, especially from a trade school, just doesn't sound very attractive to most developers. The quality of the degree is not assured, and the major itself is not a transferable skill, as a pure or applied art or science is.
On the subject of trade schools, some developers wondered allowed if they were delivering a subtle lie with their optimistic ads and promotional literature. Were these for-profit companies really in this for the long haul, compared to serious public and private universities? No one involved in a trade school was present to offer a defense.
In the end, developers agreed that experience from passion is what is really important. More than assignments, developers want to see what potential employees personally wanted and tried to do. A portfolio comprised only of school assignments is as good as none at all; there are so many hopeful programmers, designers, and artists out there, that we don't need to add to those numbers with the dispassionate.
Vincent Diamante
knows what developers want
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