The New York Times has a reasonably good article on academic programs teaching video games.
The headline of this post comes from Jack Emmert of Cryptic studios (City of Heroes).
“This whole idea of teaching game design is a fabrication,” Mr. Emmert said. “I’m a serious academic, and what is the actual skill that they’re teaching? If you’re not teaching a quantifiable skill, then you are teaching an opinion. Making games is an art form. You need to understand the technical side, but I loathe any attempt to teach game design as an academic discipline.”
As someone who teaches game design, I find this to be complete … fabrication. How exactly did Emmert reach the conclusion that we are not teaching the students any (quantifiable) skills. I’d like to know.
In the article, Tracy Fullerton sets the record straight:
“It reminds me that there was a moment when film studies really took off and the guys at the studios were like, ‘Who are these Spielbergs and Lucases and Coppolas coming out of these film schools with these crazy ideas?’ They’ll come around.”
I do love it when people wrap what they do in magic and mysticism either in order to protect themselves, or because they don’t understand their own motivations. I enjoy the claim that “Making games is an art form” as defence for how it can’t be taught in schools. Someone alert every art school that their existence is pointless.
Furthermore, I see this sort of mysticism among computer programmers. Many people want desperately to believe that they’re special and what they do cannot possibly be comprehended. Well, the set of people for whom this is true is statistically insignificant, looking at the industry as a whole. There are of course, exceptional cases, but especially within games, does anyone really believe that Madden 200X or the latest, greatest first person shooter abide by laws that are so original to themselves that lessons can’t be learned from past games to apply to their next iteration? More appropriately, was “City of Heros” really so removed from so many MUDs and MMOs that one could not teach design in such a way as to help having designed it? I can’t believe that even Jack Emmert would believe this if he thought about it for a while.
On another note, it always annoys me slightly when these articles conflate critical gamestudies programs with game production programs. This particular article did a good job noting the difference, but grouping these things together is like grouping together film criticism and film production. They’re certainly related, but they often have very different aims.
And one final note: I don’t buy the whole line about the game industry starving for talent. EA specifically obviously operates in a world where they have a line of 22 year old college graduates waiting at their doors to work in the sweatshop. If it were such a problem, they would architect their business models to retain people, not to chew them up and spit them out. Sallaries of game programmers is another place where you can see the desparity. A software engineer is almost always paid worse in the game industry than she would be outside of it. Still, people are willing to work there because it’s an attractive field. I do think the industry is getting better, but I see no evidence that it’s really starving for talent — I can’t belive that the management would be so clueless across the entire industry.
Teaching Game Design is fabrication?
As part of a wider degree in Videogame Art and Design, I did take a class in Game Design. What was covered in the program covered Game Concept Documents, Game Design Documents, the production process, we analyzes a variety of games asking ourselves ‘What makes this fun?’. We learnt how to research the market, and perhaps more importantly, we presented these ideas to the class but to also people in the industry.
I think Jack is reffering to is that he finds the idea of teaching ‘How to come up with good ideas for games’ loathing, because that’s something you can’t teach. But Game Design itself? you definitely need to know how to communicate what’s in your head in a game concept or game design doc.
There is definitely a quantifiable skill is translating “Game Idea: Yellow dude eats dots whilst escaping from ghosts” to a document that you can convince a developer or publisher to spend millions of dollars in investing.