The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student

Back in November of 2006 when I was still trying to decide the path I wanted to take to get into the industry, feminist game blogger Guilded Lily, aka. Lisa Laughy, announced that she was going to Guild Hall:

I am very pleased to announce that I have been accepted into the Masters of Interactive Technology, Art Creation Specialization, at The Guildhall at SMU. In January I will begin a two year intensive program to learn everything I need to know (but was afraid to ask) about how to create art assets for the digital games industry.

Only a few weeks after starting the program, however, did she realize that “intensive” was synonymous with “takes all your time and then some”. Under the guise of preparing students for work environments, the program’s boot camp-like environment was not flexible enough to allow Lisa to deal with unexpected personal problems while still being able to keep up with school. She has written about her experiences both on GameCareerGuide.com (I Am a Game School Dropout) and on her blog (Game School Dropout: Whining 101).

Job opportunities at the expense of creativity

What I am left wondering is this: Is it really the best thing for the school to be solely focused on giving game development studios exactly what they want, at the cost of providing an educational environment that might encourage real innovation for the industry over the present status quo?

I would have likely stayed with the program if I had a sense that there was going to be room for me to explore more creative possibilities, instead of having the feeling that I was being formed into the mold of industry expectations.

[I Am a Game School Dropout by Lisa Laughy]

Creativity and innovation are, in my opinion, the cornerstones of the gaming industry. Part of what the educational system should do, then, is to ensure that graduating students are able to think both inside and outside of the box and, just as importantly, to decide properly when the situation calls for which.

In this I am of the same opinion as Lisa: schools specifically designed to be feeders are not going to accomplish this goal. While it is important for schools to be, in part, focused on the employability of their students — offering opportunities such as internships and having seminar courses taught by industry professionals — a school primarily focused on that loses sight of what’s important: learning about making games.

Teaching to “crunch time”

The reason for the long hours and sleepless nights that are required of the students was the expectation that these would be the conditions we would be working under once we had our industry jobs: they were training us for crunch-time.

As students we were treated like employees of the school (except we were doing the paying) and were given more work than we could reasonably complete and still have time for the luxuries of life, like preparing meals and sleeping. The feeling this gave me at the time was that if I wanted to be in “this man’s army,” meaning if I wanted to hold my own in the game development industry, I was going to have to be put through the wringer and prove that I would be able to survive in the trenches once I had an industry job.

[I Am a Game School Dropout by Lisa Laughy]

Lisa’s experiences that were supposed to prepare her for working in the industry don’t fit with what friends of mine actually working for game companies experience. When I lived in Vancouver, for instance, I was friends with a guy who worked at Radical Entertainment. While it is true that he would work a lot, often going in on Saturdays and Sundays, the job allowed him to set flexible hours — he often went into work at 10am or later — and was, to an outsider anyway, a fairly relaxed environment most of the time. The “crunch time” came in at the last Friday of every month, when he would basically disappear from our social radar for the day while his team made sure that they completed the goal that had been set for the month.

It turns out that I was not the only one who noticed the disconnect between what’s taught at schools and the realities of the gaming industry. A commenter on Lisa’s blog offered up his own experience:

But that’s another aspect of the “boot camp” mentality you mention (we actually called our first semester “boot camp”): everyone gets on the same page mentally, and people with different opinions and/or work patterns are punished severely, as I’m sure you found. This is not fair, nor is it healthy, and really, now that I *am* working in the games industry, it’s not much of a reflecion of working reality. I work for an enlightened company in an enlightened country, but the hours are much more in line with those of other professions. It definitely isn’t a 9-5, but I’m working under 50 hours a week most weeks. It’s a vast improvement over the 100 or so I pushed every single week at the ETC.

[Guilded Lily on GameCareerGuide.com, comment by Mark]

To treat “crunch time” as a daily event, seems counter productive. True, there are some companies, like Electronic Arts (see EA: The Human Story), that are known to operate in such a manner, but is that really a standard to aspire to? I can’t help but wonder what is sacrificed with the time spent thinking up assignments to give to the students and then thinking up ways to change them at the last minute. Time management skills are good to have, but they are just one of the many skills that should be taught at a school, not the main one.

Are schools discouraging diversity?

I should mention that I’m not your typical applicant to game development school. Being a woman makes me a minority right off the bat, but I’m also a woman over 40, which makes me 15 years older than most of my fellow students. I don’t have the stamina for late nights that I had in my 20s, so I knew going into this that it would be a challenge. What I did bring with me was a level of professional maturity and experience that I thought would help me get through the challenges of the program.

[I Am a Game School Dropout by Lisa Laughy]

Lisa is someone who has a lot to offer the industry. In fact, she fits the demographic of a large and growing market (see articles like this and this). Her forty years of experiences growing up as a woman playing games gives her an insight into a significant, but still under-acknowledged, portion of the market. In addition to that, there are many jobs in the industry, as noted above, that have a work model desirable for the non-traditional worker because of things such as flex time.

So assuming the “boot camp” style of teaching was, in part, to weed people out, is Lisa really the kind of student that the industry can afford to have drop out? Her differences are what should make her valuable, not what make her unable to continue in a program that she worked so hard to get into. How is the industry going to properly be able to grow if the only ones who can get through gamer college are the young white men with no outside obligations and those few others who can emulate them enough to get by?

Conclusion: Thinking towards my impending education

Having read Lisa’s experience, I am both relieved that I decided not to try to go to school in the States, but also nervous as to what my educational environment will be like.

The Japanese school system is very different from the American one. Even though being at Yamasa for two years has helped me to prepare for the change, Yamasa is, at its core, a school full of foreigners, and so the teaching styles do, to a certain extent, reflect that. When I go to HAL, I will be one of only a handful of foreigners in an environment designed for students who have gone through the Japanese school system. How that will play out, I can’t yet know. I can only hope that it won’t parallel what Lisa went through.

I choose to remain optimistic, though. From what I read on the school, as well as the environment that I saw when I visited, HAL seems to be a school that values and encourages creativity and independent thinking. Ultimately, I still have six months before I will get the chance to experience the learning environment and so I may as well enjoy the anticipation instead of worrying over what may or may not be.