An Interesting Look at the Video Game Industry 361
Bamafan77 writes "USATODAY has an interesting article in their Money section on the video game industry. The centerpiece of the story is an overview of DigiPen, the only accredited video game university, but it also describes aspects of the video game industry in general including the explosive growth of the industry (e.g. Barnes and Nobles would've reported a loss without their Gamestop subsidiary) and how many universities not only fail to prepare students for the game industry, but still don't take it seriously. However, I believe things are slightly better than the days when Trip Hawkins (EA's co-founder founder) Harvard professor told him to stop wasting time with games."
Free Games! (Score:5, Informative)
One of the driving forces in technology (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone remember PONG?
Compare it now to any games made today. PONG is s simple and requires less hardware capability.
Gaming industry is one of the driving forces that PUSH the technology development.
Why would one need the latest and greatest Graphic Card?
Mostly for games......
Re:Give it another 10 years... (Score:1, Informative)
In my experience the curriculum has been to teach theory with little application, which is great if you're going into academia for the next 10 years of your life, which I'm not. By the time I get out, I'll have little practical knowledge of what is being used in the real world. I'd love to work at a company that produces video games, but I don't have the experience to do anything. Perhaps you just have to get lucky and find a place that will train or maybe pick it up in your spare time. I wonder if this is how it goes at the other uni's?
Will Program for Food (Score:2, Informative)
Digipen (Score:3, Informative)
Required Course List for a B.S. in Real Time Interactive Simulation [digipen.edu]
-dk
Universities are taking notice. (Score:2, Informative)
The University of Calgary, where I am, has a concentration for games in the BSc comp-sci program. Probably the first university to do so, but it is refelcetive of a changing attitude in universities I think.
Incorrect Info in Story (Score:3, Informative)
There is a list at the main page of the International Game Developers Association page listing all the schools instructing game design and development. www.igda.org
Try an EE Degree.. (Score:4, Informative)
Another benefit to having an engineering degree is it gives you great distinction from the packs of CS people. For better or for worse, this has been something that has benefited me in job searches, especially in this economy.
If you are an engineer in Canada, you are required to do much more complicated math than most CS undergraduates get into. At the core of all games is some very complicated mathematical modelling - I'd even argue someone with a pure math degree would be a better bet than someone from a more specific program in game development.
Let's face it, going to a school that's going to just teach you game development would be very nearsighted IMHO. I would much rather have a solid grounding in the fundamentals that I can apply to whatever comes along. Anyone who is destined to be a great game developer is smart enough to implement their own gaming engines and games, learn about game physics and AI, etc, on their own. I would give a harder look to someone with a degree and their own open source project in one of the above areas than someone who graduated from Video Game U. Unless of course, I was looking to save money.. and of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
Most of the time those who have a natural talent and interest stand out light years ahead of those who trudge through a CS degree for the money. Perhaps this is what you mean by an "applications developer".
My $0.02.
Re:Give it another 10 years... (Score:4, Informative)
While it's true that most CS concepts are language independent, I am very alarmed to see Java now being used at my alma mater. While it does have OOP features and is probably useful for future web programmers, the lack of pointers and explicit memory management widens the gap in understanding from source code to assembly, and makes the computer a "magic black box".
I am amazed at how little recent CS grads seem to know about what's really going on in the machine. For example, caught one declaring a huge local array variable in a function, asked him why he was putting all that memory on the stack, got a blank look in response. Maybe that's okay if you're going to be writing web front ends, but I'd hate to have this person writing VU microcode for a PS2 game!
In my dream world, someone with a CS degree should at least have a rough idea of how a language like C++ gets compiled into assembly, what linking is, and how the CPU actually executes those instructions. Software engineering has become a hugely diverse field--in some branches, your skill is finding existing libraries and modules and stitching them together to get things done quickly and efficiently, whereas in game programming the first thing you do is throw out all those standard libraries and write your own to save 17K. (Of course, I really don't have a clue what really goes on in mainstream programming, but I'm suspect somehow that it doesn't involve hand-optimizing inner loops or counting I-cache misses...)
A computer science program should prepare someone for any of these fields, so it has to steer clear of really application-specific stuff and give a solid grounding both in theory and in problem-solving skills, taking a scientific approach to debugging, etc, etc. I just hate to have them think that anything is magic--the proper attitude is to have the ability at least in theory to write your own version of any tool or library you use, and not be afraid or ignorant.
No black boxes, please!
What do you call a New Media degree in 20 years? (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I think 'New Media' should be renamed 'Interactive Media.' With internet, with video games, it's a form of media that the audience interacts with. With 'New Media,' what happens in 20 or 10 years? Is it still new? And what happens when HTML goes the way of BetaMax? What does knowing HTML do for you then?
I use the class curriculum as a springboard for my own education. The classes provide the foundation, I complete the rest of the picture with my thesis project. What I hope to create is an education where I can understand how an audience interacts with the media I create. Programing languages and media delivery systems will come and go, but what I hope to keep is how best to allow my audience to interact with my artwork. HTML, Flash, Director, et all are tools for a user to interact with content. I'm trying to keep in check that the tools will change and improve, but the fundamentals of audience interaction are still in play.
Not a University (Score:3, Informative)
I despair when I read posts here saying "That's my kind of education, none of that history bullshit I'll never use again." There's nothing wrong with pursuing a specialist technical career, but there's everything wrong with believing you have the right to vote in utter ignorance of history, politics and culture.
Rochester Institute of Technology (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps even more interestingly, it will be in the field of Information Technology, not Computer Science.
Re:Give it another 10 years... (Score:2, Informative)
1. Draw an electorstatic graph, and a smith chart (with clipping)
2. Animation using tweening (the user enters points on the screen with the mouse, which must be connected and shown as he draws them (the first a point of course), and when the user hits 'b', he draws a second shape, when the user hits 't' the shapes should tween back and forth until the user hits 'q');
3. Mesh Viewer: Read mesh data from a file (vertices, normals, and faces), draw the mesh to the screen, and enable mesh files to also be outputted to files
4. A 3d camera using 1. Euler angles 2. Quaternions 3. A small program demonstrating gimbal lock. Also part of this assignment was to derive the rotation matrix that glRotate uses (rotation about an arbitrary vector).
I guess it all would depend on
A) The school you attend
B) The instructor
I also go to a very small university (only 5000 students, and only 80 are cs majors), and our curriculum seems a lot harder than OU(yes I live in Oklahoma) which is a very large university.
Re:Free Games! (Score:1, Informative)
These games are the student's year-long projects that they slave for hours/days/weeks/months over...and they can add only so much imagination (based on what they learn in their classes) into the games. The only reason why these games are cookiecutter-type games is because of their classes...once they learn how to do more, you'll see better and better (lesser and lesser cookie-cutter) games from them.
-A Digipen person-