The Learning Curve: Can Colleges Teach Game Design?

Electronic Gaming Business,  June 16, 2004  

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Getting a quality workforce for the expanding games industry is going to take a serious commitment by the game makers themselves. The university and career college game design programs that are now starting to gear up around the country are going to need people within the industry who know how to teach, facilities that can model the contemporary game making process, and funding that will help ensure high quality applicants, say academics and industry executives who have been designing these programs.

The need for talented but affordable labor within gaming is going to become more important as production grows more complex. In order to expand its 500-person Maitland, Fla., studio, Electronic Arts found that it had to import workers from elsewhere - a costly proposition. At the same time, many workers who were skilled and experienced enough to handle the unique requirements of game production were long past entry-level employees and so more expensive. EA's answer was a recent announcement to partner with the University of Central Florida to start the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, a post-grad facility to train game programmers and artists who could come into the industry at entry-level but with skills targeted to gaming. "EA hopes to rapidly grow the Orlando area studio, one of five globally focused growth studios, in terms of game franchises and employees in the coming years," says Rusty Rueff, EVP, human resources. "In the future we would like to hire talent locally from UCF for these highly skilled positions."

Several months ago, EA donated $8 million to the University of Southern California in part to establish a three-year MFA in game design. Rueff says he expects substantial demand from the industry in the next six years both for programmers as well as teams of designers and storytellers.

"In the future we hope the bulk of our hiring will come from the university level, but we can't do that until the supply catches up with the demand." Ultimately, being able to hire more entry-level workers will have an effect on the bottom line, but even then, Rueff says, "in order to compete for the best talent you must be competitive in the market."

The FIEA is receiving a $4.2 million grant from the state of Florida, but EA is helping design the program, staff it with Maitland studio employees, and take on interns. The academy needs this kind of involvement from the gaming industry in order to understand and predict workforce needs, says Mike Moshell, head of the Digital Media Division who wrote the proposal that got FIEA funded.

By comparing the typical computer science degree against the skill set needed to work at EA, "It didn't take long to discover that the big difference was experience with large code based projects," he says. "We professors tend to teach problems that are within the scope of one person programming solutions. The students come out without the ability to read someone else's code or build components that work right with other people's code."

On the art and graphics end, the industry was also telling Moshell that it had loads of people able to draw well but too few who know how to tell stories or to do all of this in teams of 50 people or more. The gaming industry is introducing new work requirements that traditional comp sci and art programs cannot address.

But can these disciplines be taught? FIEA will open in Fall 2005 and hopes to produce 100 graduates a year, but its unique model is designed to mimic better the kinds of workplaces students will encounter in the industry. Separate from undergraduate life, students will work in their own complex, each with his own cubicle and part of a team. In addition to 18 course credits, they will work as much as 40 hours a week in their offices on components of large projects.

One of the chief limitations of academic training for the games industry is time, says Rueff. The short span of a two-year major or MFA program doesn't allow student to have enough completed projects under their belt. "That is part of the reason we are pushing for four-year programs," he says. In the Disney animation studios, entry-level animators often went through a year of training, time the games industry cannot spare.

Getting Ahead of the Industry

Having a constant flow of industry input is the only way design schools can stay ahead of a rapidly changing market and make sure freshmen eventually are ready for what the game industry will look like in four years when they graduate, says Pravin Wagh, a longtime game industry programmer who also teaches at the recently launched Westwood College program in Game Software Development. His program relies on an Advisory Board of professionals whom the school asks to evaluate minutiae of the curriculum twice a year. Schools need to know from game companies what software tools are in and out of vogue and the emerging needs of company business models. Westwood's board recently advised that the curriculum add network programming and compression to the subject mix because of the growing important of MMOGs. "By the time students finish their first year we'll be able to get these subjects into the curriculum," he says.