
Majoring in video games - ciscoriordan
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-gamesschools20-2008oct20,0,1425987,print.story
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potatolicious
Video game colleges are a sham, and anybody who's serious about entering the
industry would be wise to avoid them.  If you want to program games, get a
traditional CS degree, focus heavily on graphics and AI, and do a lot of your
own dev work in your spar time. 

If you want to be an artist, do yourself a favor and go to an _actual_ ,
reputable art school.  You will gain the foundation you need to be a proper
artist, not just some monkey hacking out metal-suited space marines all day. 

I've known many people in the industry, and the verdict is unanimous: game
degrees aren't worth crap, and generally the people coming out of them aren't
as capable. 

~~~
mthg
Well, the article is talking about a USC grad program, not really comparable
to one of those video game only niche 'colleges.'  The way I see it, it's not
unlike other interdisciplinary sort of grad programs (e.g. robotics).  In the
end though, you're right in saying that a traditional degree in CS, with the
raw skills in specialties needed in games like graphics and AI, is all you
really need.  FYI I am a game graphics programmer, with no game degree, just a
CS undergrad degree from a public university who took a lot of masters level
graphics classes in school and read a lot of SIGGRAPH papers. 

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sachinag
There are a lot of ads on TV for "getting into video games" - but unless
you're at a top-tier school (like USC) and have a top-tier thesis from your
MFA program, good luck with that. 

The game developers still want people who have made good mods or have done
good art on freeware or something along those lines.  That shows an ability to
do the work - the same as how you can get hired based on your work on OSS. 

Sure, if you come out of Stanford or UIUC or whatever, you'll be able to
interview with Google, but if you didn't, you better have done some good OSS
work, or no dice. 

Eventually, I'll write a blog post on the parallels on the corporate blog. 

~~~
pmjordan
Maybe it's different in the US, but in my experience in the UK game industry
we had a shortage of decent programmers.  We couldn't care what university you
came from, as long as you could code, you got in.  Of course, most graduates
_can't_ code, regardless of whether they did compsci or a game-oriented
course. ( I taught myself before university and I have physics degree and had
no trouble getting a game programming job)

~~~
gamble
Could it be that the UK has a shortage of programmers generally? 

My husband is a programmer in the games industry.  He emigrated from the UK as
a child, along with his father and uncle. ( Who both worked as programmers in
the UK) Since he still has British citizenship, we've considered spending a
few years in the UK.  What's stopped us (so far) is that it seems like
programer salaries in Britain are extremely low compared to the cost of living
there.  Things like housing, food, and transport are 50-100% more expensive in
the UK, but the salaries appear to be roughly the same as here in Canada. 
Worse, it seems like most of the software companies are clustered in the very
expensive areas. 

~~~
pmjordan
Yep, the cost was part of the reason my girlfriend and I moved to Vienna,
Austria (in my case that was moving back home) - we couldn't afford to rent a
flat in London despite both of us working full-time; it used up my entire
salary and some of hers, and that was before bills, commute, food, etc.  I was
doing ~70 hour weeks and we were barely breaking even, so we decided to get
out. 

I think a lot of smart people, especially CompSci grads ended up working in
the finance sector which pays (paid?)  way more than classic software
development, which pays more than game dev, so that probably explains the
shortage. 

With that kind of cost of living it really surprises me that there are a lot
of startups in London compared to other parts of Europe. 

------
rlm
We also have a program like the one described in Denmark with joint
productions between programmers, musicians, architects, moviemakers,
animators, graphic artists, etc. 

The first graduates just finished their second joint production (and thereby
their thesis) this summer.  It'll be interesting to see whether or not the
graduates will make it in the industry. 

------
Darmani
'"Awareness is growing, and more students are interested," said Thukral, who
in 2004 became one of the inaugural students in USC's graduate program for
video game development. " Computer science can be fun."' 

That seems to imply that the fun of CS comes from it being about a fun topic. 
That's a very disturbing sentiment to me, one all too common.