2 posts tagged “academics”

As a graduate student, I consume knowledge like I consume cake: ravenously and without thought to my general well-being. It's supposed to be a useful trait, or so I'm told. However, I am one of the very few people who are like this. It's believed less than 1% of the population gets a PhD, and for good reason. This is a career, and it isn't for everyone. That said, I'm not one of those people that think university is entirely for academic pursuits either.

There is a constant push and pull between academics and students. Academics believe that they're creating the workers of the future. Giving them the building blocks for fundamental understanding is much more important than giving them experience in the vocational tools they'll use in the short-term. Universities create engineers, vocational apprenticeships create car mechanics. There's nothing wrong with creating mechanics. The world needs all types of people. However, the farther up the university quality food-chain you go, the harder it is to convince anyone that a vocational course has a use.

With Computer Science, and video games especially, this tension reaches a breaking point. I've sat in many classes where I've felt the academics have severely impeded my learning... I needed to know the "hows" and not the "whys". I didn't care how the naïve Bayes algorithm was derived, just what it did. Even at graduate level, I run into the same things.

The added difficulty with video games is that game studios are constantly pushing on universities to be a training farm for them: teach undergraduates C++, XNA and 3D Studio Max and get them out (the irony being that game developers then say in Edge that the Computer Science graduates are preferable to those with "lesser" games degrees). This is what the academics rightly push back on, but it seems many go too far. It is important to give undergraduates an idea of what a commercial toolset looks like. Neglecting that for some idealistic wrongheadedness that forces students to always use open-source software, work by themselves (teamwork is hard!) and be damned with the real world is hurting everyone.

A moderate approach is needed: the strong basics that Computer Science has always had, coupled with an idea of what the hard road of video game development is like. A class on XNA can only benefit, an entire curriculum based around it hurts everyone. This sounds obvious (at least to me), but you would be surprised about the number of professors for whom even this is a worrying proposition.

I trawled Google looking for a relevant quote to end with, and found this by Lawrence J Peter: "Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices."

That'll do.

Removing my nose from the grindstone, I'm back. I'm almost ready to break cover on what I've been working on for the past three months, but I await the confirmation of my paper being accepted to a conference before I do. I don't want to be scooped!

On the subject of academia, it's been a time of reflection about the state of gaming scholars, my way of trying to include both games studies and games technology research into one vague statement, and their publication arenas.

For the uninitiated, the phrase often bandied about universities is "publish or perish." Professors and grad students are rated not for their teaching (my apologies to undergraduates who thought otherwise) but their research performance. Research is essentially graded by the quality of conference it is accepted to, a top-tier conference gets you an A, a middling conference a B or C. It's important, then, that you have quality conferences to send papers to in the first place.

Having been a "gaming scholar" myself for the last year or so, I have a fair understanding of the publication avenues available to me. There aren't that many. The problem, as brought up by Walker White at the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference is "silo mentality." I'll publish in my traditional field's conferences, you publish in yours, and we'll make our lives all so much easier. When it comes to academic politics, the traditional conferences are better understood by your Dean than new multi-disciplinary ones, and you're less likely to get hassled.

It's our job, as gaming scholars of all backgrounds and specialities, to fight this as strongly as possible.

I may be in the Computer Science department, but much of my work is not interesting to the wider Computer Science community. It tells them nothing about how their work could be affected. I work on making video games better. That's not something a large number of people in the traditional silos cares about, and many look down upon instead. Any gamer will tell you that the production of a video game is a multi-disciplinary affair, taking into account game design, art design and programming expertise. Our conferences have to reflect that melting pot. We're still struggling to do that, as it seems the "gaming" conferences cater to gaming studies academics, leaving the Computer Scientists in the cold. The exception seems to be FDG, but it was hard to escape the word "technical" prefixing everything. This isn't what we, as gaming scholars, need.

My current work looks at how we can use Computer Science to answer game design questions. But to get those questions, I need to talk to gaming studies academics who understand and vocalize the depths of those game design problems. Without working together, my own research suffers. We need Computer Scientists and game studies scholars on level ground, working 50:50, publishing in the same conferences, shoring up the reputation of those conferences so that they can be used as career-furthering venues. The distinction of technical and non-technical has to disappear.

Video games are a multi-disciplinary venture. The conferences need to be as well.