What struck me about the event was the lack of knowledge about games education spouted by the speakers, despite being profs. This is worrying as it shows a lack of cohesion in games education. if people can stand up at conferences and say things which are frankly incorrect, then there is a lot of non-knowledge out there, potentially.
One speaker said, 'a games company is more likely to take someone with a poor 2nd from UCL over someone with a first from Abertay.' This is simply wrong. But, allow me to explain the speaker's thinking as well as the real situation. UCL is the key. University College London (one of the semi-independant University of London Colleges) has a great reputation in 3D graphics dating back to the great Mel Slater's work. In my old virtual reality days I once spent 30 minutes watching this man being unable to work a projector at a conference at UCL. That convinced me of his greatness as the projector was clearly so far below his level of thinking (no sarcasm, a quite true observation.) His team did great things.
SO, the 'UCL is much better than Abertay' thinking goes along this line: UCL does much, much better 3D graphics programming training than Abertay so its graduates are much much better for the games industry and the games industry knows it.
The first point is true. UCL students are much much better 3D graphics programmers. The other two are nonsense. Why? Because writing games is about a potent mix of being talented, knowledgeable and creative. Given a bucket of graduateness, even if the UCL graduate has a bigger bucket being smarter and better educated (perhaps), you cannot get games knowledge, a sense of 'fun' and console knowledge into the UCL bucket as it is already full of 3D grapchis programming.
In short, the UCL graduate doesn't know what a game IS and so is unable to create a game. Employers know this. They don't want an employee who can write amazing code to make clouds move in real-time if these coulds ar superfluous to the game or - worse still - boring.
The top-flight Abertay (West, Bolton, Teeside, John Moores, Derby, etc.) graduate knows his skills and knows what they are for. So, in the real world it is the games programming graduate who is employed over he mere graphics programming graduate.
This is, to the elitist world of universities, non-sensical. But it is exactly what is happening. For example, to bring it home, many of our honours (before they are classified as 1st, 2nd, etc.) graduates get jobs before they complete their course. AT this time we have two of this year's graduates without jobs and one of the companies who took one graduate have asked us for everyone we have left to offer them jobs too. Without even interviewing them. Why? Because it is the clear and relevant skills that these graduates have which puts them ahead of the pack.
West's BSc CGT degree is possibly unique as being the only one where all the honours graduates get jobs before the start of the next academic year. This is a simple fact, and I doubt whether it is true of UCL's computing graduates.
The second, related, shibboleth mentioned was that new universities only train while old universities educate. This isn't true & certainly isn't true in my experience at West (and some other new universities.) The reason it isn't true is related, I suspect, to the fact that the academics at the new universities came through the old universities some time ago. As one education academic put it to me: academics are downwardly mobile!
So, in my case I got my first degree at Glasgow University (founded 1451) where I studied Mathematical and Computer Sciences, then, after some time as a consultant I read for a research degree in Computational Science at St Andrews (founded 1413) and am plodding my through a doctorate in education at Edinburgh (founded 1582) in the very building where the Act of Union between Scotland and England was signed back in 1707. Ohhhh. Sooooo ooooooolllllldddd. Prof Connolly has a 1st in Maths from Glasgow, writes the definitive book on databases.
You see, we teach education because we were taught education. However, I'm not hugely interested in what stuff I can get into my students' brains. I want to know what they can do with it and what it means to them. This is the trend in modern education - medicine, teaching, etc. - to get educated and practicable graduates over the mere I-can-spout-Ovid and the I-can-fix-that-washer schools of teaching.
So, a good university teaches facts, the application of facts, and the udnerstanding of the meaning of the application of fact. That creates a graduate who can do, understand what he is doing, and choose what to do next. As such, there is probably not much difference between a new and an old university in what is taught and how it is taught. They are more like overlapping venn diagrams.
The final one was over the need to interface with industry. I'v already talked of this before following Sony's brickbats at us. The people from the old universities just could not understand what we meant when we said Sony et al simply weren't helping us enough.
I think the reason is that our aims and foci are quite different. An old uni academic has his own aims. We have ours in the new universities. These personal aims are quite, quite different. The old uni prof creates work for publication, peer review, pushing the field forward using a budget he gains from research and other bodies. His aim is to push forward the boundaries of knowledge through in-depth investigation. He is, at core, a researcher.
The new university academic is obsessed with educating his students well. We simply do not have money for any real research, so we concentrate upon creating the best graduates we can. This is also because, yes, our students do tend to be more B's and C's than the new university's A's and B's students. Their students come from better backgrounds of parental support and high school level education; more likely to be confident upper middle class - sociologically B1's and B2's- than our mix of lower middle class and aspiring working class - B3's and C1's.
So we need to create commercially relevant graduates. In this, yes, we are training people (but so are academic medics, engineers, teachers, etc.) To do this we need the right equipment and knowledge. And it is Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (and Apple, Sun, etc.) who hold this knowledge. And it is they who simply will not impart any of it the the universities.
Yes, it is nice when Sony or Microsoft give some bit of kit to a research team at Edinburgh to play some research on. But, we need 20 Wii dev kits and the same number of PS3, iPhone, iPod, etc. kits would be great. Plus short courses for our staff to go on get quickly around the creating of games for these devices.
Ask Nintendo fo help? Got a set of t-shirts on that one. No joy. Ask Sony for help? Once upon a time they gave us Yaroze boxes for PS1 programming. Pretty poor clunkware, and easily cloned by students, but it was a real breakthrough. Ask Microsoft for help with games development and they go very surprisingly quiet and closed. Frankly, I have had more help from Apple than Microsoft, but then Apple drop Java and go for the ancient objective C (I'm-Steve-Jobs-and-I-once-had-a-computer-called-nextwhich-ran-this-programming-language-which-bombed). Apple is a country run by a dictator.
We need help from the games industry in the same way as medical education needs help from hospitals and education colleges need help from schools. Without this we are making bricks without straw. it can be done - and is being done. We are doing it, as are quite a few others. But it is this more than anything else which explains why so many universities are producing unemployable games graduates.
You see, it IS all Sony's fault. I hope their brick hits a plate glass window and rebounds back on them. In fairness, it should.
So, back to the conference. Was it a waste of time. In some ways, yes. It was poorly attended, poorly advertised. There was a lack of kids and students there. And the big games companies had voted with their feet no to attend. I only met two other games academic at the 'games education' event. One works in the floor above me in Paisley and the other was a music/games psychologist researcher from Glasgow Cale.
So, poorly attended and lots of rubbish talked. (I even talked some rubbish too about Skillset, but was corrected by a useful chap in the small audience!)
But we made some good new connections with new people in games. So, it was worth it. But, please, everyone who went there, forget (almost) everything you heard from the podium ...
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