What Mr. Bartle tells is not only happening in the UK. When I take a look around over here in Germany I only see a handful of universities dealing with games in an at least somehow scientific approach. Even more distressing is the fact that the bulk of these universities is privatly financed. Normal state-run universities that have way largers budgets aren't interested in games at all. When they offer courses about games, it is the same as Mr. Bartle tells - a lot of "withs" and "ands".
I would really like to see more public universities researching games for what they are. Maybe this would finally help the games industry to mature and be on par with other media.

Looks like you are just arguing the same old question. Is training better or education? I will stick with education.

Universities are a place to teach theory, understanding, history, etc. They are not for teaching someone how to specifically use Maya or UnReal Editor. This knowledge may be useful for a peroid of time, but theory will be useful much much longer.

Training is limited to learning how to use a specific utility, whatever it may be. Unfortunetely in the tech industry this will help you out for a few years and then you will be left behind, because most people do not understand the underlying mechanics, and cannot adapt to new technology. I've worked with programmers from Full Sail and such and it is very evidant because generally most of them do not understand a computer inside out like somone with a CS degree should.

Universities need to invest more time into introducting courses similar to CMU's ETC. This teaches students how to think instead of teaching them a specific tool. If I'm going to be spending $20,000 on my eductation it better last me a long time. Because I know the basics I have easily picked up over 10 programming languages. I don't think it would have been as easy if I had only got trained on one language.

Anon, we cannot consider tool teaching as fruitless as you do. A mix of both is necessary, but the emphasis has to be put on the practice and craftsmanship.
I disagree on the idea that people cannot adapt. When tools evolve, you can keep pace with their new abilities. When tools die and get replaced, you can be educated on these new tools, via professional courses. It's quite easy actually.
Theory won't lead you anywhere in this industry, as long as you want to get involved in the concrete production of games.
Many educational courses are complete wastes of time, notably as they lack fruitful ties with the industry's actors.
It also highly depends on what the attendants aim at. Is it programming, design or CGI?
CGI, for one, heavily relies on practice of major tools which are not going to go out of fashion anytime soon. Theory for these courses would only come as a useful supplement, not a primary goal.
Even for domains such as the variants in design (GD, LD), you cannot beat practice within the professional milieu, yet rare at the companies being fair in this field. We need new workers who know their stuff and gradually learn from nothing, not people who think they know all and have developed a super cortex but hit a wall when putting a foot in reality.

Richard didn't say the named institutions were the best, rather he listed institutions that people might name in reply (best known perhaps). Portsmouth he listed in bold, as he is external examiner there - so that course he knows about in some detail.

Universities which have games-related degrees have a duty to find an appropriate balance between training and education. Graduates need to be able to adapt as technologies change, but to get into the games industry they also need skills that are useful on entry.

I know that at the University of the West of Scotland we have tried our best to reach a suitable balance on our game programming course, and most of our graduates now start development careers in the industry within a few months of graduating (or even before). Recruiters are also returning, so we must be doing something right.

Stone Bytes:

Maybe those people who have developed such an ego about their education haven't realized the main lesson of a quality undergraduate education, which is to learn how to learn. Personally, I've kinda learned that the fundamentals of learning is quite simple:

1. I don't know anything
2. To really learn something, we have to have initiative to learn it

It's too bad that too many people pride themselves on the schools they come from and what sort of things they learn during the course of their studies: what matters most, at least to me, is that the person knows how to learn.

I forgot to mention, there's currently an academic collective at the University of Washington that hosts classes and seminars based around game scholarship. It's called "CGP" (Critical Gaming Project). There's a website set up for the collective, too!

http://staff.washington.edu/schenold/cgp/

I recently took a class with Terry Schenold called, "The Poetics of Play of Digital Roleplaying Games," and it was a pretty interesting seminar, though I can't say that I totally agree with the idea of scholarship surrounded around games (I'm a bit more for the "old-school" traditional education rather than going into periphery academic subjects, but that's just me.)

Stone Bytes:

"Anon, we cannot consider tool teaching as fruitless as you do. "

- I don't consider teaching tools fruitless. I just don't belive it should be the focus of education. My uni taught Max, we use Maya at both game companies I have worked with. Understaning how to model will take me much farther than learning what button to press to merge two verts. It should be relatively easy to pick up any modeling app if I know how to model. The app I use to learn is mute (sure some are better platforms to lean then others).

"A mix of both is necessary, but the emphasis has to be put on the practice and craftsmanship."

- Agreed. Both are nessassary. Theory should be taught in class. It should be applied through class projects. Once again the app used to get to the final model is mute.

"I disagree on the idea that people cannot adapt. When tools evolve, you can keep pace with their new abilities. When tools die and get replaced, you can be educated on these new tools, via professional courses. It's quite easy actually."

- I think you just made my point. You have to take a course to learn a new app? If you were taught how to model, you should be able to pick up any modeling app and be able to use it relatively well in a couple of months. The hardest part being able to figure where all the features are hidden. And yes as you learn how to use an app you slowly pick up the theory of it and it becomes easier and easier to adapt. Why not just learn this to begin with?

"Theory won't lead you anywhere in this industry, as long as you want to get involved in the concrete production of games.
Many educational courses are complete wastes of time, notably as they lack fruitful ties with the industry's actors."

- Are you kidding me? Theory won't lead you anywhere in this industry? There do you think most of game tech has come from? Graphics, pathfinding, parrellel programming, modeling, painting all existed before games and will exist after games. Design is the only meduim that doesn't have good educational classes. CMU's ETC is the only one I can think off hand that teaches proper design.

Don't assume that everyone from uni has an ego. You seem angry about either having wasted your education or having had to work with people with big egos. If you can find a good education it should give you a good foundation to branch where you want to go. As stated above the best thing you can learn from uni is how to learn. I would rather hire a candidate that knows nothing about the current tools I use, but can adapt and easily pick them up, than someone that only knows how to use Maya.

After I graduted from uni, I knew almost nothing about making games. My first game I had to work with C#, which I had never used before. I was responsible for creating the pipeline tools for a AAA title. It took me around three months to become relatively fluenty with it. Within a year I was using the more advanced features. There is not much I could have been trained in to be ready for this task. Most game companies have thier own pipelines, some even change per game.

My second game I moved to gameplay. I knew nothing about gameplay programmming when I started. A year and a half later I feel quite comfortable with most problems I encounter.

Sure maybe I would have been able to do this without a CS degree, but I definetly think it made my life much easier. Learning how to problem solve / touble shoot / learn will stay with you for a long time even when you are not working on what you studied in uni. In most cases I expect students to go the extra mile and learn appliactions by themselves when the are learning the thoery (many companies now adays have thier software available for students.) And I agree, theory without application is useless.

@ Christian Parades

"Maybe those people who have developed such an ego about their education haven't realized the main lesson of a quality undergraduate education, which is to learn how to learn."

Probably, yes. Now call me old fashioned, but I believed you were supposed to acquire that shaolin monk "learn to learn" stuff well before getting into higher courses, no? :)



@ Anonymous 15 Aug 2008 at 2:11 pm PST

Maybe we don't have the same vision of scholastic theory for game development.
When I think of theory, I have in mind a field of study which is clearly dissociated from the concrete applications. This type of theory is, by itself, not even really meant to be turned into machine language or put through the realities of a tool like Hammer of Maya.
I'm the kind to loathe the idea of extremely theoretical courses with little empirical background... there's a growing current supporting this vision and progressively gaining momentum on internet.
I'd rather put a lot on the concrete work of the body and the mind together, go for something clearly practical, and use the theory to make that practice polyvalent, to get a better perspective of the whole. To me it's rather simple, the sooner the practice the better. Trials and errors, that's how it works.
Shaping future people like mediocre applications coded for over one or two years non stop doomed to fail as you press the run button for the first time and cross fingers, that's just... terrible. Yet there are courses which critically lack those ties with the professional pool.
It's hard to describe, but they come with "a" background, which is a kind of soup of plenty of things, but when they land in the industry for real, it's almost a total reset.

"Understaning how to model will take me much farther than learning what button to press to merge two verts. [...] It should be relatively easy to pick up any modeling app if I know how to model. The app I use to learn is mute (sure some are better platforms to lean then others)."

Maybe I'm wrong, but I read that as you seem to think that learning how to use an app is dissociated from learning how to model with it.
Both go hand in hand, at least in CGI, and it's very effective to immediately put into motion what you have learned about an app, to complete tasks and make concepts real, and that without irrelevant theory.
What you learn on a tool, with lots of practice, forms a set of (universal?) rules which can be moved to other tools. You don't access those rules, which become and need to become intuitive, by focusing on theory. I'd be tempted to say that the theory grows out of the practice. Then, on top of that knowledge and firm skills, you can strap plenty of extra fluff about theories in art, logic, etc.

It's like driving a car. You learn how to drive by precisely being put into the control a car, which is nothing more than a tool, not by listening to tapes telling you how to steer the wheel and how you must pass manual gears. You learn the specifics of the tool as much as you learn the overall rules of driving in different circumstances (safe being drunken) and different places. Then all cars are different, and you need to adapt to different controls, although there's much less differences between a Chevy and a Vauxhall than between Max and Maya (this parallel is a bit funny when you think about who owns who).

You'll only know how to model by developping skills with a set of tools.
In that case, the theory comes as a complement, not as the starter.
We had a clearly self educated lead artist who relied on his experience, no pompous theory whatsoever, and a good amount of common sense, and it worked very well (the new one, well, that's another story altogether...). Theory could have possibly been a good addition to his skills, but that's stuff he added later on on his own, under various forms. In the end, we worked with someone who damn knew his stuff.

"Are you kidding me? Theory won't lead you anywhere in this industry? There do you think most of game tech has come from? Graphics, pathfinding, parrellel programming, modeling, painting all existed before games and will exist after games."

Ah, that's probably where the word "alone" slipped. :) Read as "theory alone". You have my sincere sxcuses.
That said, there are two things to notice there.

First, I don't exactly believe the theory ingested during those uni courses is really what's behind the technical breakthroughs accomplished by coding geniuses.
I think it has more to do with imagination, iterative work and that drive which has to do with the "do it by yourself" thing, which is more about mentality than learning strings of data floating in the air but not seemingly having any real concrete application.
You could say "but that's what the theory is about, that's what they teach you".
Yet I don't think self taught people, who'd have skipped that bit about theory, would fail at excelling in those domains. Their knowledge has to be passed down, but I think their knowledge is more about mentality and concrete work than butt sitting and going bookworm.

Secondly, in your own post, you tell me that you learned game-centric applications of your former knowledge via extensive practice (pipeline tools and then gameplay). But I'd guess that this former knowledge itself was founded on less specific practice, learnt methods and tried languages.
However, it is right that certain fields do seem to hinge on greater amounts of theory than others, but even coding languages have their own logic. Going down the empirical route on a language as soon as possible is a good way to realize how you have to think for a given language, and it's equally good, if properly done, to be used to show how to think differently if you were to move to other tools.
You might think I believe an app centric education, secluded from any out of the box thinking, is the best thing, but it is not.
I think we all agree that a mix is important, but I'd put the emphasis on the smart practice.

"Don't assume that everyone from uni has an ego. You seem angry about either having wasted your education or having had to work with people with big egos."

I don't make such assumptions, it's clearly false. I did, and do get, my load of encounters with "egoful" specimen, but such people generally come from various horizons, so there isn't much of a pattern to establish there at all. Hell, ego itself, sometimes, isn't even too bad if properly balanced, when it happens to be associated to virtues which drive teams forward.
It's all about how misplaced it is I suppose. But I did get to see *some* people being a tad petulent just because they had read like fifty PDFs and a half a dozen design books, and boy how that didn't get them anywhere.

"If you can find a good education it should give you a good foundation to branch where you want to go. As stated above the best thing you can learn from uni is how to learn. I would rather hire a candidate that knows nothing about the current tools I use, but can adapt and easily pick them up, than someone that only knows how to use Maya."

But how could you know that the person only knows how to use Maya and couldn't move to another app? This would be, at best, a baseless speculation about the person's abilities.
I've rarely seen people, with experience on only one tool, being unable to make the transition from Maya to Max or even XSI, or else. Most of the time, they're actually willing to expand their craftsmanship to other tools.
If anything, you'd put the finger on an exception defining a rule.

"And I agree, theory without application is useless."

All depends where you put your theory then, and what you mean by theory. I admit my point of view is probably too design centric, since programming and CGI schools are way more rounded by now, although there still remains a need to adapt specific courses to the industry in some places, but what I see from people coming from pseudo "pure" design courses doesn't bode well for the moment. It really becomes efficient when the student puts a foot in the industry as part of his training, at which point I'd clearly say keep those bucks for you and get there as a full time junior... if you can. But it's also about the reality of the industry. Experience is greatly valuated there, and it's a logical thing.
I'm yet to see the point of a design focused course where concrete work is more than an option.
For anyone who seeks an education, it seems to be much more productive and sure to opt for a programming course which will progressively infuse aspects of game dev in it, as it provides a strong technical background.
And there's the fact that when you have a job there, you defend it fiercely, which of course doesn't help, and which encourages recruiting departments to focus on experience only. They're there for the business as well, with all the goods and bads it implies.

Seems to me that part of the problem is that academics either don't have the desire or don't make the time to play games, talk to gamers (beyond a formal study setting) and just absorb the industry. I kind of have a toe or two in academia and the rest in the games industry (et al.), and I've been a little frustrated by my interactions with some academic colleagues. When I ask them what games they've played lately or try to start up a discussion along those lines, I often get something like "Oh, well, I don't play games but I'm interested in studying them." One individual was even writing a research paper on FPS-type games and they admitted they'd never played Halo, Call of Duty, or Counter-Strike but "I've talked with a lot of people who have". Hmm.

Sure, it's a time issue, I understand that. I myself am tasked with reviewing a lot of games (not for press purposes however) and it is very time consuming. But at the same time, academics need to at least strive to understand the medium they purport to research (this hasn't been as much of an issue among younger academics; it's the mainly the 40+ ones I'm talking about - and for the record, I'm 43).