The importance of (good) teachers
I usually recommend that students looking to get into the games industry as coders stick with traditional, academic courses like Software Engineering or Computer Science. Not because those courses teach the content most appropriate to games development, but because they leave the students with a well rounded education. With a well rounded education, they can learn the practical / vocational skills needed for games development (a higher level of programming expertise usually) on their own, plus they have the option of a career somewhere other than the games industry if they change their mind or find there is a shortage of employment available. If they specialise in a vocational course too early, they wouldn’t get the more general education that would allow them to work anywhere other than games.
That’s not to say that I discount students from vocational games courses though, far from it. But the quality of those courses varies dramatically, and so it’s even more important to assess the quality of the education they’re receiving. The first and probably biggest alarm bell that rings is when courses employ lecturers without games industry experience. That to me is utter madness. They might have masters degrees or doctorates, they might be the most engaging lecturer in the world, but without industry experience, they are wholly unqualified to be teaching a vocational course. That’s like someone teaching others how to swim when they’ve only ever had a bath. There are many other warning signs of course, but to me an institution that thinks to staff their course with vocational teaching staff with no experience in that vocation is only ever going to produce sub-par graduates.
So my advice to those institutions is this: hire industry experienced people. Poach them away from the industry with better working conditions and less stress, even if you can’t offer them more money. Entice them with the notion of enthusing a new generation of games developers. Find the next big studio that gets shut down (there’s no shortage of those), and see if anyone wants to take a break from the industry proper to teach. But whatever you do, don’t hire academics who’ve never shipped a game in their life.
And don’t hire people who couldn’t get into the games industry on their own, but who want to pretend like they’ve made games so get into teaching. Hint: you’re not a professional games designer until someone has paid you real money to design a game which has shipped. That doesn’t include:
- designing games for your friends
- designing your own game but never actually making or releasing it
- writing books about other peoples’ game designs and how they are good or bad
If you’re going to teach games design, personally I think it should be compulsory to detail which games you designed (or part designed), and how well they did. Your students should be able to go find your games and judge for themselves how good your design chops really are, before they start taking your opinions on design as ‘the way things are.’