Tighten up the graphics on level three

A lot of people are skeptical of a game design major.  Many people who haven’t been exposed to video games as an entertainment business rivaling Hollywood wonder just how productive a degree program about time-wasting diversions could be.  And within the industry, there’s a different kind of skepticism.  It’s still a fairly young business, and game design programs are still a new concept.  Only a small portion of the people in games hold game design degrees, and all of the respected veterans got where they are with a combination of computer science and liberal arts degrees and plain gusto.  But there’s definitely another reason for the stigma attached to specialized game design programs: they produce a lot of terribly bad work.

Maybe I’m speaking prematurely, having taken only one introductory course for three weeks, and I certainly risk being exposed as an uninformed jackass myself.  To SCAD’s credit, it has an ITGM major that’s well regarded in many circles, good professors, and a pretty robust offering of useful and relevant courses in multiple disciplines.  It certainly doesn’t seem as shaky as degree mills like UAT, Collins College, or DeVryPowerUp47.com with free game demos.  But no matter where you are, a game design major tends to attract people who are very, very bad at group discussion.  Every lecture is filled with uninvited interruptions that spark a charlie foxtrot of separate, irrelevant, uninteresting, and uninformed anecdotes, opinions, and tirades.  There’s no discussion, just the same five to ten people shouting what they have to say, even if it’s completely unrelated to the lecture, the thread of the conversation, or the previous comments.

For some reason, 19 year-old kids majoring in game design think there’s something inherently special about them, and about video games as a hobby.  When you put 20 of them together in a room, they get giddy and jump at the chance to share their inside jokes and demonstrate to everyone else what a “hardcore gamer” they are, since they don’t usually get the chance — because everyday people don’t care how good you are at Gears of War 2 or what a hilarious game Conker’s Bad Fur Day was.  It doesn’t matter to them that video games are a massive mainstream hobby that the vast majority of their age group enjoys.  Those people are just casual gamers.  How dare they want simpler interfaces?  How dare Nintendo sell out to the man and make games for fad gamers — games that bring sweeping innovation to the medium, introduce millions of new buyers to the video game market, and sell 15 million units?

What irks me the most about all the loud, uninformed comments I hear every Monday and Wednesday are the people who don’t recognize that making video games is a business, and that yes, video games are time-wasting diversions.  If you spend all your time playing games, you’re never going to learn how to make them.  If every time you open your mouth you act like you’re writing a post on an internet message board, completely without forethought, you’re not allowing yourself to see other points of view.  Basically, if you think you’re enlightened and presume to know everything, you’re never going to learn everything.  And so you’ll never get a job in the games industry.  Because making games, after all, is a business.