(((When I hang out with the academy, I often hear educators freak out about the Internet. "Why are students paying to attend our *&&^%$ school? Why don't they just Google data, or watch freely distributed lectures by MIT professors? All data and knowledge are moving onto the Web! We're toast!")))
(((But then when you hang out with game designers, you meet people who really ARE web-educated autodidacts who made up an industry out of chickenwire and spit.
And it made a ton of money. But boy do they ever hanker for academic and intellectual respectability. Where are the gamer archives and museum vitrines? Where's the
Endowed Chair in Joystick Manipulation? Where's the noble canon of the digital arts? Where are the Ten Commandments?)))
href="http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Commandments/commandments.htm
Link: Ten Commandments for Game Development Education.
"This is an approximate transcript of the text of my keynote address at the Education Summit of the 2008 GDC. I present it in this form because the nature of the material does not lend itself to the traditional paper format. Also, because the lecture is informal and to some extent ad-libbed, this is not a verbatim document.
My thanks to Ola Holmdahl at the University of Skövde for his suggestions on this lecture.
Introduction
Good morning. My talk today is called “Ten Commandments for Game Development Education,” but before I begin, I want to introduce myself. I’m a 19-year veteran of the game industry. I’ve worked as a programmer, producer, lead game designer, and now I’m a game design consultant. At the same time, I’m sort of a “freelance professor.” (((Boy, that pretty much says it all.)))
"I have no formal pedagogical qualifications, but on the strength of my experience, I give game design workshops and lectures at both industry and academic institutions around the world. I do have some formal appointments, however. I’m a Visiting Fellow at the University of Teesside in Middlesbrough, England; a Visiting Professor at the University of Ulster Magee, Northern Ireland; and a Guest Lecturer at the University of Skövde in Sweden. (((See, the academy *loves* gamers. It's just that they're, like, intellectually alien. So it's kinda like watching spiders mate.)))
"In today’s lecture you’ll hear me mention these institutions a lot because they’re the ones I know the most about. I’m based in the UK, but I travel all over the world, and I usually do one or two tours of North America a year. I’ve also written a textbook, which I’ll talk about a little more in a minute.
"I should explain a little about the impetus for this lecture. In the course of visiting all these places, I frequently get asked by the faculty what the other institutions I visit are doing. They want to know if they measure up, and they want to know what I think about their program, and about game development education generally.
(((I can guarantee you that the pioneers of game development would never have dreamed of getting a "game development education." But they'll be doing great when junior high school students are forced to play the stuffy "game classics" while they're also bored to tears by SILAS MARNER
and GREAT EXPECTATIONS.)))
"Well, this is what I think! My talk takes the form of ten commandments, but I’m going to read them in inverse order from least important to most, like a David Letterman Top Ten List.
"10. Thou shalt not give tests in game development courses, nor be dogmatic in thy doctrine, for even thou knowest not all.
"Let me explain the background for this....
