On the apparent puacity of new game ideas

Pop into Zaavi and have a look around.  Lots of digi stuff in plastic boxes: music, movies, games, etc.  The one in nearby Glasgow has three floors: popular stuff on ground floor, was-popular stuff on the 1st floor, and kinda niche stuff on the top floor.  At the far corner of the top floor there is a partially soundproofed area.  Here be found such oddities as world music and classical music.  And in one of the classical racks there is stuff they are selling off cheapo.

Down in Largs we have a popular two-floor branch of Woolies.  As you come in the door you are quickly welcomed past the coke and irn bru to the mini-Zaavi (if I can put it that way without getting sued!)  Here be found a fair size rack of games.

Now, there is a greater range of cheapo classical music on the far corner of the obscure top floor of Zaavi than there are games titles for sale in Woolworths.  I reckon - hvaing browsed both - that Zaavi cheapo classical was about 60 titles whilst Woolies near-the-front-door games had about 40 titles.

I can hear your brain wheels chugging: this isn't fair comparing Glasgow Zaavi with Largs Woolies.  It is as fair as can be made as we are comparing the unpopular end of a big Zaavi with the popular end of a popular seafront town Woolies store.  If I went round a Game store and compared this with the downstairs floor of a small indie music store, the comparative titles range would be in the order of 1 game : 100 CDs/DVDs.

Yet we are regularly told that the games market is of the same order of size worldwide as the recorded music and movie industries and a serious competitor with TV.  So, just why are there so few games titles compared to there increasingly less-successful competitors?

Part of the answer is in our mental barriers.  As humans we keep on classifying things.  Its what we do.  From the I-think-I-will-now-reorder-my-CDs-in-artist-surname-order fix on a dull winter evening to the utter strangeness of a citywide bus-timetable.  We create order out of chaos, but in doing so we reduce and simplify.

For example, say we said 'games' instead of video games in the same way people say 'music' or 'movies' as shorthand for 'recorded movies' or 'recorded music'.  What games do people play?  Football (amateur, professional, kick-around), word games (crosswords, banter, chat-ups), work games (must look good/not look bad/get promotion/look busy), board games, etc.  Video games are an electronic part of what we do in life.  As humans we seem to be always playing games one way or another.

Of course, games can be dangerous.  Looking busy at work is hard work when you haven't got enough work to do or don't want to do your work.  I had a summer job where I and others were sacked for hiding behind pallets in a factory; the atmosphere turned nasty and a fight broke out.  But, it was just a game, wasn't it?  

Do you remember the scene in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin when he is sitting with his usual cronies in the commuter train doing his crossword.  It is a game to see who finishes first, not about doing the crossword.  It is a game of who is alpha-male in the train compartment.  Reggie works out it is a game where cheating is easy - he just puts random letters in his grid and sits back looking smug.  I reckon that was three games going on: the crossword puzzle, the Im-best game, and, the I-can-cheat game.

My daughter came home with a large psychological leikert test sheet.  It was apparently designed to help you identify mental and character weaknesses.  At the end you were invited to send it off to the ch*rch of sc**nt*l*g* who would contact you to provide help.  Mmmm ... a very dangerous game hidden within an apparently fun game.

Last silly example, my eldest daughter used to drag me off to watch Dundee United at Tannadice Park ("yah-nay-t-it!').  During one rather dull patch a player fell over and broke his leg.  You could hear the *snap* right round the stadium, and the *oooohhhh*afterwards from the crowd.  Chap was stretchered off in great pain with doubts over whether he would ever play the game of football for money again.  Dangerous thing a game.

Of course we call this subcategory of games 'sport'.  But, I propose, in much the same way we call ours 'video games' or 'computer games'.  But, its all about game playing.  I didn't even mention the games the football spectators are playing (I remember the chant at Rangers fans when they had become a good and so a popular team again and were back to beating us: where were you when you were rubbish?  Brilliant!), TV people (we are the best TV people/person), footie owners (my person is so tied in with this club I will risk my personal fortune on it), non-attending 'fans' (my person is somehow tied in with being visibly attached to football-label), etc.

So, I think we are having a classification problem.  And we can see this as the Nintendo Wii creates ever more space for itself in Woolies and in Game.  'Are these games?' we ask as we look at the puzzles and sweat-inducing titles and peripherals.  Yes, they are games.

Finally, back to the title of this blog: the paucity of new game ideas.  Yes, if you define games as video games genres classified into existence in the 90's.  You can do this for football to: just Scottish football clubs, or, just top-rank European clubs, etc.  But, you can also include Kirkintilloch Rob Roy, St Andrews United and the church league clubs, etc.  It's all in the mind, this classification thing.

There will always be a limited range of shoot-em-up and beat-em-up games and, like Batman movies, they will sell well if they are good.  But, look beyond your horizons.  Great new worlds of new games and game ideas await you in the off-world space colonies, as someone once almost said.  Its all in your mind: reality is much, much bigger and the opportunities to do a Nintendo are still there for those with new ideas.

I wonder what today's video games market would look like to our PONG! playing predecessors?  But, that's another time and another blog ...

Skills versus Knowledge

It is a truth universally acknowledged that people go to university to learn things.  And these things are difficult things you could only learn from being at a university.  Was this ever true?  The trouble with this viewpoint is that it is just that: a point of view.  No that a viewpoint is of no use.  If I stand on a viewpoint, such as on a hill, I can see far and understand better where I stand.

But, the view that a university is about imparting and gaining knowledge depends on much more than such a simple statement ay mean at face value.  Don't get me wrong.  I am not a dumb-downer, even if I have always taught at 1990's universities with less academically qualified students than I learned with at top-flight unis.  So, do my students learn less than I did?

Not - I know this sounds dumb - less quantitatively.  Stay with me on this.  In four years of study you learn four years of stuff.  Its the same amount of stuff at whatever uni.  Sorry, I can't be clearer than that as Computing Science stuff doesn't easily translate into Philosophy or Medicine stuff.  

Is the stuff qualitatively different: deeper, harder, broader, etc.?  Yes, of course it is.  Medicine is harder than Engineering which is harder than Computing Science which is harder than History.  Just check the diaries of students of each subject for the balance of classes, studying and partying. 

But, have we been making subjects ever easier down the years.  In some ways, again, yes.  Back in their college days the new yoonis taught 30 weeks a year and students were in classes 25 hours a week.  Now they are in classes for max 24 weeks a year and spend mebbes 15 hours a week in classes.  Do the sums: was=750hours, is=360.  

But, is less time in class less knowledge?  In some ways, again, yes.  If I lecture a class for 3 hours a week I can say far more than if I just do so, as I do, for 1 hour a week.  But, is more less?  Again, sometimes the answer is yes.  The fact that a lecturer can yabber on for hours doesn't mean the content is good; a kinda 3kg for the price of 1kg educational bargain.

Yes, we have lost content.  In my subject, Computing Science, there is an endless list of what we no longer teach: compiler design, stacks & heaps, machine code, procedural design, algorithms, etc.  Some of that we'd just love to teach but can't.  Why can't?  Because pressures on teaching cause effects on teaching.

These pressures are multifold: industrial requirements, student expectations, university equipment, textbook contents, personal knowledge, etc.  Courses change as the times around them change.  No man, as Donne put it, is an island.  And, to mix the metaphors, the ivory towers of academe don't exist on an island any more either, funding, staffing, administrivia, etc. all impose upon our teaching.

So, we change our course contents.  Computing Science, if it is to produce programmers, becomes more Applied Computing than CS.  Students learn less about the fundamentals, but still graduate as competent programmers (we hope.)  It's not just us, at St Andrews they teach Latin to 1st year students who have no school qualifications in the subject and those who do.  Those who do must learn more stuff than those running to catch up with them.  The 4-year bucket is only so big.

These days it is skills over knowledge, I admit.  But, this is not say it is poor for the graduate.  Time may tell, but perhaps even time won't tell as so much is so hard to tell, and the telling is often pointlessly historicist or biased.

What I do know is that we must produce graduates who know and can do at the same time.  Knowing is not enough any more by the greater measure of graduate usefuleness the world outside acadaemia is currently using.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.  I don't mind as long as the tune is good, and, IMHO, the useful graduate is a good, if different tune, from the merely knowledgeable graduate.

The importance of nonsense

Games are just stupid.  They waste hours, days, weeks and months of your life.  They cost a lot of money to play.  The platforms, internet connections and peripherals cost a lot of money too.  They consume power that costs a lot of money (your money.)  Games are stupid.

The trouble with the word, 'stupid', is that it implies stupidity.  And stupidity implies something base and pointless.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Nothing people do is without an aim and purpose.  Even stupidity.

The trouble (2) with the word, 'stupid', is that there are people who believe they are above being stupid.  They take great pleasure in proving that if something is stupid it shouldn't be done.  They even define what they think the word, 'stupid', means.  And what does it mean?  It means what they think it means and what they think the can sell as a meaning to others.

We all disagree on what 'stupid' is.  I'll take an example of one of my pet hates: golf.  Gosh, golf is just so utterly stupid, IMHO.  In My Humble Opinion.  In MY humble opinion.  In MY opinion.  You see, claiming that my opinion is the truth is simply, well, stupid.

I have some great friends who love golf.  A strange walk, with a strange bag of clattering sticks, taking hours of your life away, with strange clothing (why is there a set of im-not-currently-golfing-but-I-am-a-golfer clothing and another set of im-currently-golfing clothing?  what's with the strange colours?  the strange Star Trek-esque sticky-out shoulder pads?  the women with visors and the men with baseball (baseball??) caps), the endless stultifying boring TV coverage (is it just cheap?), etc.

You see, I think golf is stupid because I don't get it.  And, to be honest, I don't want to get it.  So, I think it is stupid.  I'm not just saying this for the sake of the blog; I think golf is stupid.  Am I right?  Personally: yes.  Globally: case not proven.

When poked humans have the weirdest range of preoccupations: walking, gardening, TV watching, old book collecting, loud music playing, etc.  I expect there are some strange people out there for whom walking through mud and midges in pelting rain, sweating wet, to drop onto a wet hummock, to eat a squashed sandwich and a frozen chocolate bar on a wind-blown mountain top isn't a personal pleasure.  I don't get people who wouldn't enjoy this.  It's - again I am being honest - great fun.  Even the prospect of dropping dead on a mountain side and my body not being found until a thaw in summer 2031 isn't a bad way to go - beats taking an extra stroke on the 9th, as golfers sometimes exit life stage left.  (even the thought of being found dead in a pink jumper, yellow trousers, white shoes and a cap saying Fitleist (who him?) is to me unthinkably stupid.)

We humans also have a range of accepted tastes.  This word, 'taste', is a lovely way of defining other people's stupidities.  I know people who like the movie Zoolander.  Or listen to Queen.  Or think Graham Norton is, well, funny.  These people have different tastes from me (i.e. tey are stupid.)  There are, I believe, those who don't laugh at The Mighty Boosh, or find a Wagnerian opera long'n'loud'n'Germanic, or who can't appreciate the awful'n'good movie Excalibur.  These people have different tastes from me (i.e. I am stupid to them.)

You see, it goes both ways.  If you don't get my stuff then it is stupid to you.  And by no getting it you are stupid to me.  What a stupid word, 'stupid', is.

Maybe, just maybe, there are people out there who don't get video games and video gaming.  Maybe, just maybe, they do things with their time, money and living rooms that video gamers might, just might, consider stupid.  Maybe the anti-gamers like doing cross-stitch, or listen to Val Doonican, or do The Sound of Music in karaoke.  Maybe these aren't actually stupid things to do with your time.  Maybe these people have different tastes from video gamers.

Mario is daft, as is Sonic.  Final Fantasy is uber-geeky.  Gears of War is bang-bang-you're-dead fun to play.  These games take time, money and mental effort.  They are fun.  They aren't stupid.  

As our colonial cousins 'cross the pond would put it: Your Mileage May Vary.  

Going 2 uni or kolij

Way back in the dark ages when I was yooni-going the choice was remarkably simple: I went where my father and his father had gone.  This was, being a Scottish highlander, Glasgow.  It didn't matter too much what I did as it was simply having a degree that mattered.  But, even in the '70s times were a-changing.  I took Computing Science as a filler, found it really easy, and fell into a wide range of job opps as a trainee programmer.

This trend has continued, with a little of the pre-70's thrown in.  A friend of mine, now one of the army of vice principals at one of my old alma maters, St Andrews, has noticed that the days when a MA from that ancient pile got you a job, even if it is in the apocryphal Mediaeval Basketweaving, are gone.  Its what you can do that counts.

Its also who you know.  If daddy works in the city then it's a real advantage.  If daddy is a lawyer in Edinburgh then you are far more likely to get a job devilling in a chambers there than someone with a better degree who comes from a former mining family in Lochgelly in Fife.  The Elite still exists, if getting slightly more dilute in their powers.  (But don't take that necessarily for a long-term trend.)

The majority of people going to College or University these days are the first person in their family to do this.  Its a bewildering array of establishments and courses (aka 'programmes') on offer.  I'd like to take this opp to put some of my experiences as a father of 4 uni/college-goers on paper, with an admixture of my own experiences as student and educator.

1. Go to degree fairs - these are organised by such as local authorities in school assembly halls of an evening.  All the local unis and colleges will be there, plus some professional bodies (e.g. medicine, law, civil engineering), some major national unis, and some advisory bods.  Go there with a strong bag and collect every prospectus you can see.  Go with an idea in mind (e.g. I'd like to be a Vet/Games Developer/Artist) and ask questions off the staff at the stalls.  There won't be any real hard-sell.  If they ask you to fill out a card, do, but don't give a phone number (email and snail-mail addresses are OK.)

2. read the prospectuses - well, not every word.  I'd skip the welcome to "Rutland Technical University from the Vice Chancellor" bit.  Go through and see what courses are on offer.  There will be some you haven't even thought about.  You should consider everything.  Use pens, postit notes, fold pages over.  At the end of a few hours you will have a pile of thumbed and annotated prospectuses (or, prospecti, if you prefer!)

3. sit down and consider this debris - what are you really interested in.  My eldest son found the only uni offering History & Politics as a single subject (i.e. not taught by two departments as effectively two half-degrees, but by one department as a single subject-degree).  My younger son found the three local yoonis offering Geosciences.  I found Zoology at the very back.

4. make a decision or two - local yoonis/colleges are cheaper to go to.  Accommodation can cost thousands over a year.  But, a good course is worth it in the long run (=life.)  Get your list down to a couple of different degrees (one is even better) and around half a dozen establishments.

5. make contact - phone them up.  This is wonderfully easy and a very telling way of learning a lot about a yooni.  If they don't answer the phone, try a couple of more times.  You'll probably end up talking to an admin jonnie.  (S)he will be able to answer questions about such as accommodation, travel, the going rate (i.e. what the likely entry qualifications are going to be, which can be quite different from that given in the prospectus), any interviews to get on the course, portfolios to be submitted, etc.  Get your list of questions written up in advance and make notes in the prospectus on what (s)he tells you.

6. make contact - speak to an academic.  These are the real people who teach the real course.  You will have to thole them for 3-4 years, so you must feel comfortable with them.  This is the really telling point: if they won't make space for you to make a personal visit and chat then write them off.  They are simply not interested in you as a person if they won't do this.  Make an appointment to see them and go.  Expect to spend 1-2 hours at the yooni.  Ask the really awkward questions: pass rates, drop-out rates, degree classifications gained, graduate destinations, staffing, equipment, course content, etc.  Yes, you can get this at Open Days, but, frankly, they are small beer compared to what you learn on a one-person visit.

7. make a final decision - go where you feel the vibes were right: happy, friendly academic staff, clear and Ok answers to questions, a course you fancy doing, geographical location (although I rate this one less as I happilly went to a non-city centre excellent uni and a small-town excellent one as well as a great city centre one.

8. you now know what you have to do to get on.  UCAS form compelted, etc.  Yada, yada.

9. what if your chosen course demands a subject you aren't currently studying?  Ask if there is a summer school to make this up or another equivalent you can get in the next few months.  If not then you have little choice other than to plan to read for another degree or to take a year more to get that extra qualification.

10.  straight to yooni or a year out?  Humanly speaking, a year out makes a huge difference when you are young.  An 18 year old is world-smarter than a 17 year old, and a 21 year old is an adult over a post-schoolkid 18 year-old.  It can also help earn a bit extra dosh.  But, any years put off are - think about this - chopped off the end of your working life.  This is the highest earning years of your life in all probability.  A year spent travelling to Jerusalem, Rio de Janiero or Rome is a year more working before retirement.  The choice is yours.

11. be prepared to work hard and enjoy yourself.  I loved all that generic classification stuff in Zoology (in the days before the proto-religious tree huggers and the anti-religious scientismists took over Biology *sigh*).  I loved how some lines of Algol made the processor jump.  And how you could write a program to write a program that didn't look finally like a program I would have written - ooooohhhhhh!  There are dull and heavy bits that have to be tholed: I hated reading all that French post-modernist philosophy (beautifully taken off by the Pythons in the line "c'est un choux?') at Edinburgh; bollocks, but bollocks that I had to pass.  There wouldn't be light without darkness, would there?

12. clearing - if you don't get the asked for qualifications there might still be some hope, especially if the course is not regularly oversubscribed.  They may ask for BBC, and you only get BCC, but they may have an extra 5 places, and they get the results a day before you (didn't know that did you?), so may have decided to take you anyway.  So - phone up.  If not, phone round the other establishments you were interested in and see if they will take you on clearing.  Move fast!  Some people have been turned down by a lowly Salford to be accepted by an uppity Manchester.  Its amazing how easy it can be to get into a major university to read a standard degree (e.g. natural science, social science) in clearing.

A final word in What Not To Do: don't just fall for the first thing you see offered locally.  An ad on a bus or in a newspaper is just that: an ad.  A visit from a college to a school with a speaker on the joys of being a psychologist is just that: a chance to begin thinking about courses and colleges.

Enjoy!

Degrees and Jobs

Looking back at many years in education, as student (Glasgow, St Andrews and Edinburgh universities), educator (West of Scotland, Paisley, Newport Wales, Bolton and Abertay) and father of students (Caledonian, Glasgow, Salford, Dundee and Abertay) I'd like to put down some reflections on the non-apparent linkage betwen a university degree and a job.

I suppose the place to start is with the games degrees.  Its a simple fact, not a boast, that I designed and rolled out the first named games degrees worldwide.  this is not to say that I was the first to take games seriously in acadaemia (David Seal at Bolton at least beat me to that distinction.)  But, if there ever was a degree designed to put people into jobs, its a games-named degree.

One of the problems is that the timescales of degrees don't match those of the employers.  It takes years to think of a new degree idea, to research it, to bounce it around industry, to reflect upon it, to decide whether to keep thinking or not.  Once you decide to 'go' i has to end up in a prospectus (published 1.5 years in advance of the new student entry date), and then it takes up to four years to get a graduate out.  How long is that?  Around 5-10 years in my estimation.  Then the degree has to run for another 5-10 years to be worthwhile.  Academics need to be trained and retrained, etc.

Against this the industry keeps changing.  Games consoles rise and fall.  Some of this is predictable, some not.  So, we can see the PS3 being thought about, mooted, hyped, games prepared for it, in secrecy, markets prepared before it arrives to a huge tada!  Or, the Wii hits the market and people just luuuuuurve it.  nobody, least of all Nintendo, expected that, so the market tilts to one side, stocks are unavailable, coders don't exist, dev kits are in short supply, this tanker takes quite a bit to turn.

Industry and acadaemia need to meet at the point of graduation.  The end-of-course ex-students need to find themselves in a place where employers welcome them in and find the useful.  This just aint happening enough in the games industry.  Lots'n'lots o graduates, few find employment, many posts are unfilled.

Of course, sitting on my side of the fence chucking stones over at the other side, the industry has much to take responsibility for.  This aint new.  Back in the '70's the Engineering Industry Training Board put a levy on non-training companies which went to training companies.  I'm not suggesting we do this, but that we recognise that the industry also has responsibilities to train new staff and to help the trainers of new staff.

That the industry does no more than pay scant attention to the training of new staff is obvious.  Few university games degree courses are ever visited by or input to by games employers, whether they are geographically local or global players.  The unis are left to use scant resources to create bricks without straw.

Quite simply there is too little resource in the system.  There are places making a decent fist of it.  But these are not obvious.  I attended a meeting where Skillset turned up to accredit a degree (to save my job I will only add: not my employer.)  The package of documentation was put together by management.  The academic staff knew nothing of what was going on until the meeting was called.  We turned up.  Skillset smiled at us and asked some obvious questions.  Management were present and the atmosphere was one of stick to the party line.  Despite clear and obvious failings in the degree programme Skillset gave it the OK.  I had the feeling they were going to do this anyhoo.

So, if Skillset is not a clear indication of the quality of a degree programme, then what is?  The only clear indication of the quality of a graduate into a hands-on industry such as video games development is a portfolio of work to show employers.  Indeed, pre-Skillset this was the way it was generally done.  A student brought along his work and showed it to the employer who decided on whether this was worthy of the kind of person they wanted to employ.

This is an easy one for employers, so I suggest they take this one and still run with it.  Little shows a student's worth than his work.  Grades are infamously flakey in the grand scheme of things, for a wide variety of reasons (yes, one is fraud, but that is the least of the problems with grading student work.)

For universities the creation of student portfolios is a challenge.  Unis are intensely beaurocratic organisations.  Layers and layers of management and admin jonnies create work for themselves by creating procedures and forms.  The nett result is that a straightjacket is created where passing or failing is the be-all and end-all.  But, what does 'he got 56% in Advanced Mathematical Modelling' mean?  Very little, to the employer.

The student, and the academic, must create what is a parallel instruction stream where the student spends his time at university creating useful work.  By 'time at uni' I mean all the years he spends between entering and leaving: holidays, weekends, etc.  During this time he must build his work, save it, comment upon it and keep it employer-facing using such as Bebo, wikis, blogs, etc.

Perhaps one day we will get the active and the recording part of acadaemia back together.  But, for now, we need to make sure that students spend their time creating useful objects - useful to them and to employers if not to admin jonnies - that show their work.

How do and should they go about this?  I'll leave that to another blog as my wife ha got up and is frowning at me for working on my hols at 8.45am.  And, the sun will shine today, my eldest and his wife are up from Manchester.  We'll take them across on the ferry to Dunoon as this gives a great view of the Firth of Clyde - mountains, sea-lochs, seaside settlements, blue skies, etc.

So - keep studying, keep working, keep enjoying life.

John S.

jnsak.wikispaces.com