James has a very strange supposition about how to teach game design
to somebody who's never done it before.
And I don't mean teach in the casual sense, I mean like teaching in a formal setting at the university level,
because as many schools as we have out there offering game design programs,
most of them are still trying to figure out this problem: how do you properly teach game design?
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James had so many students come up to him and say
"My schooling didn't really prepare me for the life I wanted. It didn't really prepare me to be a game designer"
and it's led him to wonder if perhaps we need to take a whole new approach to how we do this.
More than this though, it's also the fact that he's had more and more professionals
come up to him lately saying that when hiring for junior positions,
they don't put any special emphasis on people who have a game design degree
because many of the people they've hired from game design programs
haven't proven to be better candidates. In fact, they've often proven
to be less adaptable than those with other educational backgrounds.
Overall, it's really made him question how we go about educating designers,
and after putting a lot of thought into it, the strange hypothesis he's come up with is that
we are perhaps teaching too much game at game schools.
I know that sounds odd, but hear me out.
We learned long ago that we shouldn't just teach designers
tools and software, game engines and 3d software; a game designer should be able
to pick those up on the job. Every company I've ever worked for has had its
own unique scripting language, or at least its own crazy additions and modifications
to the tools they use, so simply learning a piece of software
isn't enough, because tools change constantly and they're not universally applicable.
If you've learned Maya, but then you find yourself working on a 2d
mobile game, well, Maya's not gonna do you much good. If you learned Unreal 3
a mere half decade ago, that knowledge is practically worthless today.
So much of the industry has moved on to other engines and even those using Unreal now
are working with such a radically different version that what one might
have actually learned in classes on Unreal 3 doesn't have a lot of application today.
And most schools have realized this. They stopped just teaching tools long ago.
Instead, they went on to teach courses like level design and game balancing.
But here's the thing: level design and game balancing are actually just tools as well.
They aren't fundamentals. They aren't the key skills that a designer needs to be a good designer.
James talked about this at GDC, and in preparing to do so, he asked many of the
professional designers he knew what they really look for in a fellow designer,
and it basically boiled down to these things: First: communication. You need the ability
to express the design to members of all the different departments clearly and concisely.
Second: collaboration. You need to be able to work with people from
many different fields and with many different mindsets. The ability to take feedback
and to really incorporate it in your design. Third: a love of learning.
You need the ability to be able to pick new things up quickly because different
projects will require developing an in-depth knowledge of different things.
You might have to learn about the flowers of the English countryside
or the weapons of World War II, not to mention figuring out the scripting engine and
the pipeline and the peculiar quirks of whatever team and studio you're working with.
And a designer needs to love doing it to really do the kind of deep dives that
allow them to add the little touches that really make a project special.
Fourth: scope. You need to be capable of creating realistic design plans and the willingness
to cut even the parts you personally love the most in service of the project as a whole.
Fifth: logical thinking. You need to be able to build and work with logical systems,
as that's the foundation of most game systems and scripting languages.
Sixth: lateral thinking. You need to be able to see problems from a new perspective, and
find answers outside of those that are traditionally used.
Seventh: a breadth of knowledge. This is the only one on this list that I think is debatable, but most
designers I know like to see potential applicants have knowledge of things
other than just games, as this gives them a greater field to draw from when
solving design problems, which in turn leads to better solutions.
And if you look at this list you'll see one commonality: none of those things are
really game specific skills. It doesn't matter if you're coming in as a level designer
or a system designer, I'd rather see that you have good communication and
collaboration skills, a sense of scope, and the ability to learn quickly,
than to have a level design or system design course on your resume. So as utterly batty
as it might sound, in a world where we only have a very limited number of
courses to prepare you to be an effective designer, I would rather see us cut the
game specific courses from game design degrees if it meant us being able to
provide a better grounding in the rest of those skills. If James had to make a
guess he would wager that a well formulated game design course would actually look a lot like this:
First: a hardcore focus on the liberal arts. And when I say hardcore, I mean
challenging to the point where failure is not uncommon. It would include a
grounding in the philosophy and literature that makes up
the Western tradition along with a focus on Psychology and Mathematics.
The variety and volume of the material here would hammer in the ability to rapidly
assimilate new materials, and the courses would be taught in a discussion format
with regular papers to train up communication skills in both the verbal
and written medium. All rote tests and quizzes would be abandoned, as this
education is far more concerned with how the students are using and playing with
the ideas they are exposed to than with their absolute retention of the details therein.
Additionally, the pillar of mathematics in the course would be
strong with at least one math class per semester. This encourages logical
thinking and give students the one almost universally applicable design skill.
Next, one to two courses in formalized logic would also be a
possibility as this also reinforces the logic training and makes the jump to
scripting easier for designers who don't have much experience with scripting languages.
And then, anchoring the program, each semester would have an underlying
mega course project course that all students must take where they actually
make games. Every semester, month in and month out, every month they're there.
The best way to learn to make games is to make them.
This course would be given at least twice the credit hours of
most courses, and students would be expected to spend a fair amount of time
outside the class on this course. In this course, the students would work in teams,
preferably interdisciplinary teams if the school can support that, to create a
game that integrates an idea or topic from the other courses. This would build
collaboration skills, teach scope, and build lateral thinking muscles as the
constraint of having to incorporate elements from their core liberal arts
courses will force them to rethink traditional game genres, or force them
out of established genres entirely. Such a degree would probably preclude large
class sizes and would require someone with a fair amount of development experience
to mentor the students in the project course, but if that could be achieved,
it would produce far more adaptable designers that are far better
prepared for the industry and far more desirable as potential employees.
Way more so than those that simply have a smattering of game balancing courses to their name. ♫ [Outro Music Begins] ♫
Anyway, I hope that sparked some ideas. ♫ [Outro Music Continues] ♫
Thank you for watching, and I'll see you next week. ♫ [Outro Music Continues] ♫
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