For those of you who want answers to life’s burning questions, this page will probably disappoint you. But for those of you who are interested in this blog, how it came about, and how I came to study what I do and where I do, this is the page for you.

Why make a blog about being a student of game design?

Part of it is that I don’t think there are many blogs out there that talk about gaming education. Articles? Sure. Blogs? Not so much. I strongly feel that for gaming to be taken seriously as both a form of recreation and a valid field of academic study that there first needs to be a strong foundation laid in terms of educational curricula. One way to do this is to create resources for people interested in game design, hence this blog.

Another part of it is that I’m going to be studying in an environment, and a field, that most other Westerners aren’t able to (see “Why go all the way to Japan?”), and I think it’s helpful to have the information in order to compare and contrast the approaches to learning and how that affects (or doesn’t affect) the industry.

And the last part is really that I want to keep a record of my experiences and this seemed like the best place to do it.

Why go all the way to Japan?

When I was first researching this issue, I was unable to find any schools that had a video game creator specialization — specifically the planning, directing, and producing aspects. When trying to decide what to do after my two years at Yamasa were up, I asked my friends in the industry: “How does one get into game design? I can only find specializations for programming, graphic design, and sometimes level design and that’s not what I want to do.” The answer was basically, “When you get seniority, you get to design games.” The discussion held on Iris’ forums (Getting into the industry: is it too haphazard?) yielded much the same results.

This approach just didn’t make sense to me, and so I thought to myself, You’ve already spent two years learning Japanese, why don’t you see if you can study game design here? And, like magic (well, the magic of the internet), I realized that Japan was the holy grail of game design education. As the pamphlets started pouring in, it became clear that even the crap schools that I wouldn’t go to if they paid me had game planning as a specalization. At least part of this, I think, is due to the fact that technical schools aren’t synonymous with “couldn’t get into college” like they are in the States and Canada.

So, ultimately, I went to Japan because 1) I was already in Japan and it gave me an opportunity to continue in the language, and 2) it had what I wanted as an already well established part of the curriculum.