Serious Games Taken Seriously

The annual Serious Games Summit is taking place in Washington D.C. this week, and Gamasutra has several articles exploring the events that have taken place so far. Write-ups include How Games will improve CS education, Wargaming Science, and What's So Serious about Game Design? From the Games for CS article: "So, how do games fit into this? Well, Barnett pointed out to the audience, which included a number of university professors: 'We all know of [computer science] students, particularly young men, who get started gaming.' In fact, the majority of students have experience of being able to change parameters or other attributes in games. Thus, it's believed that game-related learning may be a way to stave off the precipitous decline in entry to computer science departments - overall enrolments are now down near a level last seen in the 1970s, and the amount of women attracted to the discipline is "less than dismal," according to Barnett. Worse than this, there is also a high attrition level, with 10 to 20 percent of students dropping out each year."

So... What now...?

[Pichu0102]

Now we're using games to improve the behavior of people now? Weren't we just blaming them for school shooting recently? Seems like they're thinking about this at the wrong time.

All I'm interested with in a game is...

[voice_of_all_reason]

How soon can you beat the money back out of the prostitute you just patronized?

Multidiscipline

[fishybell]

The best part about learning game design is that you learn many different disciplines:

• Networking (client-server and peer-to-peer)
• Usability
• Graphics
• Program Design
• Artifical Intelligence (of sorts)
• etc.

All of these are very applicable in the real world. Even if you work on a team, and do just one part of the whole, you still learn a lot.

Re:Multidiscipline

[wishus]

The worst part about learning game design is you have to deal with players, cheaters, and customer support.

All of these are very applicable in the real world. Even if you work on a team, and do just one part of the whole, you still have to do a lot of crap.

;) Sorry, I'm a little bitter today. Play Warband 1066 [warband1066.com]. A new game just started this afternoon.

why is changing majors a bad thing?

[avi33]

...if they go into it thinking it will lead to a fat paycheck and then they have to stay up all night writing a simple bubble sort? ...if they get exposed to all sorts of curricula at University that they like better? ...if they realize they just like coding (and can learn it for free) but don't have a similar passion for all the odds and ends that entail a CS degree? ...because they expect one thing and find another?

Last time I checked, University is not the army. You are free to change your mind. In fact, it's encouraged.

Same mean, higher variance

[One Div Zero]

In the 1970's, the only computer science related disciplines were Math, Stats, Electrical Engineering, and in some places, Computer Science.

Now that computers are everywhere, and support almost every non-humanities discipline, it may worry some that CS enrollment is dropping.

Yet, the number of students enrolling in computer-driven fields, who learn to program and apply computer science to a specific area, is increasing. There are more majors to enroll in, with the a higher number of interested students - the mean number of students enrolled in computer driven majors is increasing, but the distribution among majors has increased faster, pushing the concentration in CS down.

For instance, we now have:

• Computational Biology [cornell.edu],
• Information Science [cornell.edu],
• several different application areas of statistics,
• cognitive psychology,
• linguistics,
• economics,
• a dozen engineering majors,

and many other majors all vying for the students that, 10 years ago, would have just gone into CompSci.

You don't have to believe me, but I've seen the data for myself - I'm on the Computing and Information Science [cornell.edu] working group at Cornell University

Less comp sci students = good thing.

[Seor Jojoba]

There's less money in a computer science degree now, so I imagine the people getting into the field are doing it more often for the right reason--i.e. the inherent fun and satisfaction of making a machine do your bidding. I got plenty tired of all the entry-level programmers in the 90's that created problems for the real coders to clean up after. Now there are less programming jobs to be filled here, because some of it has been outsourced, and the stupid money dried up. You would expect for there to be l

Re:Less comp sci students = good thing.

[kniLnamiJ-neB]

Amen. We don't *need* more CS majors. Making games a "selling point" in the curriculum is going to decrease the average intelligence of CS Majors, because we're going to attract those meatheads. If you're going to have gaming curriculum (which I *DO* believe is important, by the way), have it in the junior and senior-level classes, where the dipsticks have already been weeded out. Then give us some fun yet challenging assignments in the gaming world. DON'T increase enrollments by offering "game design"

CS

[clragon]

for a second there i thought CS ment Counter Strike... i need a life... anyways playing games definitly made me and a few buddies of mine take interest in computer programing, but once you start you realize its not as fun as you thought it would be and hard work is required, then alot of people back out. so computer science kind of gives the illusion of a easy and profitable occupation but is actualy really hard.