Thursday we’re going to present the videogame major and the entertainment studies degrees to the whole faculty. Gotta let everyone have a say to get buy-in. I love how they make assumptions without having any background – sounds like a lot of overlap was one comment – and that was just from looking at course titles! Are there too many critical courses, couldn’t they just take media A&A (not the way it’s taught now since it doesn’t talk about games at all and they have a definite aesthetic), shouldn’t it just be aminor because it’s really just a job thing. Sheesh.
Right now we’ve put together the degree guidelines. People are worried that there are too many required courses. But it’s a really interdisciplinary program – people making games need to know about programming (even if they’re not programmers, they have to talk to programmers) and art. They need practice making the games.
To tell ya the truth sometimes I think the program belongs in the computer science department. People in our school don’t really support it whole hog. They want to do it on the cheap – if they do it at all. They don’t see how it could/should affect their classes. Maybe it’s a tree/forest problem. Maybe they think it’s going to take away their students – tho if we could spread out the students into stuff that’s not production, it would seem to be a good idea.
So I gave up on completing the specific minors. I think Elizabeth is wrong on this one – they need one of these minors and they need other outside courses. It’s an and thing, not an or thing, in my mind. I figure it’s something we can work on in the future after we get some more connections with the industry. One department wanted their course used – except for the way the program is laid out we needed it to be a junior level course. They agreed to change it. So I won that one for now. The dean is talking at least ne new position – but it’s a workload line so it only lasts 3 years. Maybe then you can justify turning it into a real line – need to find out how that works. Who’s going to take a 3 year job – especially in our expensive, isolated neck of the woods where they’re not going to make many new connections or be seen by movers and shakers in the videogame industry.
So maybe at the game developers conference in February I”ll ask how folks get other departments involved, if they’re creating multi-disciplinary programs or just one dept primarily. Fortunately I have a dean and a dept chair who get it and I’ve found some folks in different departments who are involved and want to do new stuff. Guess I”ll ask how people get other important folks to buy in. I thought books and curriculum development would be the hard part. It’s fun tho – there are models out there, sample syllabi, more and more books. It’s the people part that confounds me. Once the faculty get on board then I have to find professionals willing to come here to talk, teach workshops, give internships. We have that through years of connections in tv and movie production. So maybe it will develop over time. But kids will expect it to have the same level of connections as other parts of the program.
Then there is hte matter of toys – we need hardware to play games on. Should we specialize in flash games, casual games, PC games, virtual worlds or designing games in general whether we can actually make them or not. Developing AAA games is a huge undertaking – millions (tens of millions) and bigger and bigger teams. We can’t do that. Do we do levels, mods? Do we do design documents and graphics? What focus makes the most sense. Go broad is my thought – develop games in as many ways as you can – focus on the gameplay angle, the idea of fun, stories. Make not computer games just to get more practice making games. Learn a lot of tools. Then you can show you know the basics, you can apply existing software and learn new software easily. Since the tools change so quickly and companies often build proprietary tools – we can teach how to learn tools, basic functions.
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