Games have a place in higher education, but where they are now isn’t working.

(Disclaimer: the experiences that I have had and witnessed are not referencing a single game development college program, but more importantly, are from nationwide colleges across the United States. I speak as someone that has spoken to dozens of students from the west coast, the midwest, and the east coast, so my advice is neither isolated nor directed at a specific school.)

Originally posted on Medium here.

     This is my senior year of college. I’ll have been in school for 5 years by the time that I graduate; a time lengthened by transferring schools and an internship. I’ve switched majors once on paper, but three times unofficially. I have about a full year of professional-level experience, which is a mix of AAA, indie, and freelance work, and I’m finishing with my Bachelor’s in Game Art in May. I am tired, ready to graduate, and concerned about the state of how game development is perceived in higher education. Games are young, which is a huge part of why game programs aren’t polished, but I think the issues go a bit deeper and are more complicated than that.

     As someone that reviewed portfolios for a studio last year at GDC and continues to do so, as someone that has worked my ass off to be ready to work before I graduate, I’ve seen patterns in students in both my near vicinity and well beyond it. These are not isolated problems, but issues that the wide majority of general game development programs have issues with on some level. A lack of preparation, a lack of cultural understanding, of technical know-how, of soft skills, of professionalism, of interviewing skills. I think these come from issues that many schools that teach at game programs wrestle with, and I don’t think these issues are isolated between different programs. I wanted to put into words the concerns that trouble me and how I think they, in a perfect world, could be minimized into being significantly less impactful on students’ and faculties’ successes. This doesn’t consider financial resources, human resources, the speed at which programs change evolve, and dozens of other real-world factors, but I think if students better understood this list, they could more effectively take their education into their own hands and take some responsibility and control over their career trajectory. It’s really hard to find statistics and research on this stuff, so I’ll be speaking completely from experience. The majority of these points are aimed at issues that I see in students that want to work in AAA or competitive studios but aren’t doing the work to get there.

Expose Students to Reality

     The primary issue that I see is a general lack of professional-level skillsets, and accompanying that, ignorance of the quality that students should be aiming for. The world doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it DEFINITELY doesn’t exist in the vacuum that a classroom can be. It’s easy for students to get in the habit of just comparing themselves to their classmates to determine if they’ll be “ready” or not when they graduate, but that doesn’t work. If you compare red to magenta when you haven’t seen the rest of the rainbow, they look completely different.

     A solution to this is to take students out of the context of being a student and to consistently expose them to concepts, challenges, and situations that more directly emulate or actually exist in the professional working world. When students are shown how far they are from being in working-ready conditions, they respond in one of two ways: either shutting down or tackling it head-on. I think it’s only fair to give students the opportunity to decide how they’ll react. That is ultimately their choice, as is their level and definition of success. Students should be intensely challenged as soon as they walk in the door of secondary education and to be told, “This is what it takes. If you’re not going to do it, you probably shouldn’t be here, and the door is over there.” This is doing the students a favor, not being cruel. Not being transparent about the necessary steps to be successful is taking advantage of them, and I think it’s a school’s responsibility to be clear and direct. When students invest in their education, they’re essentially saying to that school, “I trust the quality of your program, and I trust that you will tell me what I need to know.” When that hard work is pussyfooted around by the school’s marketing and other layers of muddiness, that’s taking advantage of the student body. That’s taking a student’s money, selling them a product without reading the fine print, and patting their back as they walk out the door. Outplacement rates of game development schools are frighteningly low, but most students are completely unaware of this. The first school that I went to was a globally-ranked industrial design school in Cincinnati. Their acceptance rate was less than half a percent. About half of the students dropped out before the end of the first semester. They told us on our first day, “The first year is to pull out the weeds. If you are still here sophomore year, then we know that you’re a flower.”

     This taught us a multitude of small lessons, some harsher and crueler than others. The primary lesson learned is that no one cares about your excuses, your reasons for not showing up, your absences and tardies. Telling a professor why you didn’t put your heart into a project isn’t about making your relationship good with your professor, it’s about convincing yourself that missing one project won’t affect your career path, your chance of success, your dedication to craft. None of that is true. Making excuses to anyone is a façade of making excuses to yourself. This also taught us that in order to be successful, the work was going to challenge us in new and confusing ways. It started our careers with the expectation of difficulty, dedication, and sacrifice. It taught us that breezing through the program wouldn’t simply get us removed from the college, but also removed from our ideal trajectory. Expectations were high and we set out to meet them. Because of this, outplacement rates within 6 months of graduation were incredibly high, and average salaries of these first industry jobs were around $65K.

     By exposing students to the work of professionals, they’re removed from the classroom vacuum. Most people can look at two pieces of work side-by-side and identify the better one. It doesn’t just take playing games and talking about them and piecing them together to be a strong developer. It requires a fundamental understanding of craft and skill outside of the world of games. In order to be an excellent game artist, you need to understand art in a way that just isn’t taught in game programs. The reason that I am where I am today skill-wise is primarily because I was taught product design fundamentals in Cincinnati. It’s not just about being fast in Maya or being able to render a scene really technically well- it’s about being able to visualize a concept elegantly and then to execute and implement it without losing anything in the translation. I can draw well because I spent 3 18-credit hour semesters drawing literally hundreds of boxes and ellipses by hand for hours and hours every week. I hated it, but I trusted my faculty and it paid off.

     This sort of lesson, frankly, isn’t something that’s taught in game art programs. It just isn’t. I personally think that the first two or three semesters of game programs shouldn’t be talking about games hardly at all, but rather, with students separated into the industries that built up the fundamentals of their concentrations into what they are today. Art students should be taking rigorous fundamental drawing and traditional painting classes, regardless of if they’re going 2D or 3D. Programmers should take fundamental computer science classes. We need to step out of this game bubble and realize why the people that made games before secondary education game programs are so badass at what they do: a fundamental understanding of the skills required. Learning how to use Maya doesn’t take that long when done properly, but an investment into the understanding of light, color, and elegant design pays off for years. It’s like constructing a building. If you’re only thinking about making quick walls and a roof, you’ll have a hatch hut that falls at the first breeze. In order to build a skyscraper, you need to understand where you are presently, but also where you need to be and how to get there. We need to invest in our foundations before even attempting to build the walls, but we need to have a blueprint so that we can mold our foundations with sights set on the future.

Portfolio Killers

     Major flaws that I see in students’ portfolios are a lack of professional communication, presentation, and content choices. In an age that we can just Google what a professional portfolio looks like, this is baffling. Students should be told early in their college career to start looking at professional portfolios so that they have a stronger understanding about what a convincing body of work looks like. On this same note, I think that students should be required to have a portfolio website by the end of their third semester. It doesn’t have to be full of finished projects, but the layout should be polished and professionally put together.

     A portfolio is not a business card, it’s not a stagnant presentation. The most successful and convincing portfolios are living documents that evolve and change as the creator does. A portfolio must go through several passes of evolution before it can be impactful. By having what is essentially a template by their mid-sophomore year, the students then have time to make iterations, respond to feedback, and align their presentation closer to the professional self they want to portray as they become more experienced. I think students should consistently compare their presentation to that of more successful predecessors so that they can understand what led to their victories. What is each piece communicating? What skill is it demonstrating? What gap is it filling, and how can the student build their own bridges?

     Having a portfolio is more than just being ready to apply to a job. The purposes of having a body of work go far beyond that; they can be to self-analyze your skills, get feedback from peers, and start specifying career goals. There are also lessons that can be learned early on if students have a game-specific portfolio-building course. Common mistakes made by students could be easily avoided if the common ones were addressed in the curriculum. Portfolio reviewers see patterns of mistakes, such as game art students having figure drawings, messy traditional work, or unrelated content making up most of their body of work. If it were explained to students why these sorts of pieces weaken a portfolio, then maybe these things could be avoided altogether.

     Another issue that I see is the lack of early trajectory by students, and the lack of seeking trajectory. If faculty want students to be hungry, then they need to put a meal in front of them. This aligns directly with my thoughts on having a portfolio early on, and I think that exposing students to how awesome they can be also challenges how willing they are to get there. A lot of folks want to draw well, but few are willing to put the time into drawing ellipses and perspective. Being epic requires a lot of self-motivation and drive, which is built up through constructive habits and high expectations. That is a decision that students need to be willing to make.

Experience Boost

     Going off of the portfolio pointers, another major reason that game students aren’t finding success after school is a lack of experience. I’m not talking about a lack of studio time or professional resume points, but I’m talking about lack of experience in general. I think it’d be empowering for students to learn early on about the ways that they can get game dev time under their belts without being in a professional studio. That said, the only thing faculty can do here is to make suggestions. The choice to be proactive is completely on the student. Here are a few recommendations that I think should be communicated: