Where have all the [UK] game designers gone? Not to a proper school, apparently.
Yup, a new report out of the North East shows that there aren’t nearly enough accredited universities in Britain to properly feed the growing video games industry. Too many students are obtaining too many Mickey Mouse degrees from no-name universities, often without the hard math and science background required for a successful career.
Additionally, it seems some folks think that a career in games is an easy one. “Oh, I’ll play video games all day.” No, you won’t. Even if you did, odds are you’d tire of it rather quickly.
Any game programmers in the audience? Were your classes filled with no-knowthing (not the political organization!) hacks? I’m not a programmer, nor did I have a passion for math in high school, so I have no idea what that “scene” is like.
Actually I think the problem is a little more complicated.
Firstly I don’t think the games industry is able to attract truly good graduates. The basic salaries are terrible and they do not compare with other industries. Debt laden graduates looking to clear their debts will aim for technical roles in either the finance sector or in other software development roles at large blue chips.
Knowing lots of people that have worked or still work at games companies, it is clear that these places are not the best places to work in terms of conditions and treatment. Lack of progression is also a problem.
Having said that there are 1 or 2 people that even after 5 years of being with the same studio, working on the same series of games still love their jobs. So I think it does come down to suitability and desire for the work, I think the same can be said about most technical jobs.
The lack of technical skills is actually more widespread to most technical fields. Most university graduates are simply not equipped with the right skills.
We should go back to the 2 tier system for universities, basically re-introduce poly-technics that focus on real skills rather than theory. Sort out the A-Level system, whilst improving vocational training programs for school leavers. Also bring back apprenticeships, but up date them to include things like software development relevant to specific industries.
Games industry in the interim could also be more open to developers wanting to cross over from traditional software developments roles. The games industry is one branch of software development that is not embracing outsourcing like other development houses, so why are they not grabbing those people?
Right, if I wanted to make lots of money I’d go work for Microsoft or Google or something, which is just down the street from where I work now (programming games).
It’s a thankless task at times where you have to deal with boneheaded/enthusiastic producers/managers and lots of other people who all seem to believe they can make games, but often ultimately just struggle with the same problems of being woefully untrained and unprepared. Probably 2/3 of every company I work with makes the same bizarre and mind-boggling mistakes and are generally not interested in listening to people with actual experience.
My main issue with hiring new graduates is that they either come from these budding new ‘game development’ universities that teach rapid and cookie-cutter methods, resulting in an army of the same ho-hum adequate workers with the same skills or they come from regular schools and don’t know what they’re getting into. As a side note, graduates from regular schools are usually completely inadequate if they don’t apply themselves outside of school. It used to be a joke that we’d have to teach them what a debugger was, and then the joke got old, fast. We have a rule that about 2-4 years of college equals one year of actual work.
Most of what we care about ultimately is what students do outside of schools in actual test projects to supplement the basic education and to see if they’re enthusiastic enough to stick with the painful transition time (or have already realized games are a lot of work).
The upside is that a lot of people really have no idea how games should be made and there’s no completely right answer. There’s a lot of wrong ones, of course. :) So there’s a real feeling that you can be an important part of something if you keep at it. As well, many jobs do not offer the possibility of public recognition in the same way that games do. That can be a rush, though we’re talking 3-30 months of ‘pain’ before anyone cares or even sees what you’re working on. If someone entering the industry can’t handle that, then they’re in the wrong business and probably are making my job harder. :)
I don’t actually believe that schools can ever adequately prepare today’s game programming candidates, because the main quality that makes someone worthwhile to us is their ability to learn concepts on their own. This is probably similar to other IT jobs, but especially so in games where a lot of what you know becomes antiquated in as little as a few years and there’s little or no resources around to teach you. It takes someone encouraged enough to learn outside of school and embrace a life of learning. That’s something which doesn’t seem to be valued in schools.
Finally, to answer the last paragraph, we get a lot of people applying who have never worked on games previously. Those tend to not fit in especially well for several reasons:
1. Inadequate math skills. You gotta at least know where to find things in your Trig/Geometry books.
2. Shock that they’d have to start at a low paid junior position under people younger than they are.
3. Often do not have any actual interest in making games and tend to be employees that do not stay long enough to make it worth hiring and trying to train them (hoping they last through a product cycle of 1-4 years). Usually this is very obvious as they have never even tried to make a game before.
4. Have skills that are interesting but often not applicable. How many programmers outside of the games industry know what a BSP tree is? AI? Custom menu systems? For this reason they tend to end up as juniors and unhappy and leave for a better job as per problem #3.
These were among the two most insightful comments I’ve ever read here.
From the outside looking in (on the video game industry), I sorta had the feeling that working for an EA or Activision or whomever was less fancied than a Google or Microsoft. Go to a pub and say, “I work for Google” or “I’m a video game programmer” and see which gets the better reaction. You guys get a bad rap.
This whole issue is a great idea for a longer feature, “What’s up with game development today?” Who to contact, I wonder?
-na