Tech art mentorship (for women/non-white people)
I've been thinking about ways to get a more balanced demographic into the game industry, and I'm thinking of offering a free mentorship in the skills I have to try give some guidance and pass on some knowledge in the hopes of fast-tracking some learning and future careers.
I don't really know how it'll work yet, and in all likelihood it'll depend on the people who take part: what their skill levels and prior experiences are, how many people, how much time I have available. But overall, it's likely to include regular practical assignments and crit that include painting and sculpting (for developing some art eyes), and some programmatic bits that include writing tools and shaders, maybe fx, maybe making our own little tech demos and stuff.
If you're in the right demographic (i.e. female and/or non-white), drop me a PM so I know you're interested.
I don't really know how it'll work yet, and in all likelihood it'll depend on the people who take part: what their skill levels and prior experiences are, how many people, how much time I have available. But overall, it's likely to include regular practical assignments and crit that include painting and sculpting (for developing some art eyes), and some programmatic bits that include writing tools and shaders, maybe fx, maybe making our own little tech demos and stuff.
If you're in the right demographic (i.e. female and/or non-white), drop me a PM so I know you're interested.
Comments
I think it's better and easier to talk about class rather than race and gender. But hey that's me.
Please don't make this conversation about white males, consider how that comes across to anyone that might want to take @Elyaradine up on this offer who isn't already massively privileged.
If there's a bloody great hole on the left side of your soccer field, you fix that by allocating dirt to fill in that hole. That's not being unfair toward the team who usually plays on the right side of the field. That's allocating resources to where they are most needed to make the playing field level and fair.
@Elyradine is putting his money where his mouth is to try to rectify a problem that most of us acknowledge is real, but don't do much more than shake our heads and tsk sadly at. Let's not give him a hard time about that, eh. ;)
I'm looking to do an introductory course in game design at Hottentots-Holland High School for grade 10 and 11's beginning of next year. I have already organized use of the facilities at the school, and by the numbers that attended our quick talk earlier this year, I think there is a lot of promise. I still just need to structure it to give the students the most benefit. Will be picking some brains at the next meetup.
I also feel that if I don't explicitly state that this is for a particular marginalised group of people, I'll still end up with, like, a 9:1 male:female, 9:1 white:non-white split, at which point we've made no gains in terms of our government-lobbying power.
@johnny_final_02: You know you're my friend, and you can ping me any time if you're stuck with something. You work hard, and you've got some sweet work. I really think that if there are art (or tech-art) job openings for games elsewhere in the country that you won't struggle to make a strong application. I really, really don't think you need this mentorship. :P
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I've had people asking to join who're from all over the country, making meeting physically pretty unlikely. I'm considering recording some video or doing write-ups that contain all of the information we'll be covering. I'm thinking that in that case, I can share that stuff for cheap/free with South Africans, and potentially sell it on Gumroad or whatever (there's plenty of art and programming training available online all over the place, but not very much that combines them into tech art), which will hopefully cover the time it takes to build the material. The mentorship itself would still have a limited number of seats that I pick based on what I feel will provide strong improvement to the long-term growth of our local industry (e.g. people of certain race or sex who're determined to enter the game industry, or people who're involved in education or outreach). In the courses I've taken, the feedback/Q&A/mentorship part of it has been absolutely invaluable, but it's a pretty big hit to the mentor's time when there are more students (often the mentorship courses cost some 3-4x as much as the course material itself).
So, basically, if you don't get into the mentorship, you'll still get access to what I'm teaching. I just won't be giving you personal attention. (Though really, if you're stuck with anything, you could probably just post on this forum and someone would help you, so it's no big deal imo.)
The other thing is that I'll hopefully have a pretty good idea of how much time/effort all of this takes, so that if other people want to run similar workshops/mentorships/tuts or whatever, they'll have a data point and not be doing it completely blindly.
Ultimately, I still want to be spending the vast majority of my time making games and building my own skills (I still have a long way to go myself), but I figure after Broforce I should be able to dedicate several hours a week to putting together the material, and when that's done it's relatively low maintenance (maybe a couple of hours a week in Hangouts/Skype answering questions and giving feedback).
I'm not sure about any of this, but that's what I'm thinking at the moment, and I think that'll work out pretty well for everyone, with the only "risk" being my running low on energy (at which point stuff like the mentorship's gotta take a lower priority to my emotional well-being and work I'm paid to do), but I imagine the students will be understanding about that considering what they're standing to gain anyway. :P
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@pieter: That is freaking awesome! :D I hope you keep us updated so that we can help in whatever way we can!