Vega to offer degree course in game design

edited in General
From the IT news article linked below.

http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2016/05/south-africa-vega-to-offer-degree-course-in-game-design/

It's interesting that there are more and more courses been offered in game design. I am not sure where the valuation of the industry in the article comes from. Are they measuring the sales and retail market or the games development market with a broader scope then we typically would. Say adding gambling and gamification industries.

Personally I think it's a good thing, we just need to make sure there is a larger industry for all the new graduates to join. :)


***edit***
@Bensonance pointed out that there was a post from Vega previous asking for comments. I have updated this to include the link.

http://makegamessa.com/discussion/3883/bachelor-of-computer-and-information-science-in-game-design-and-development

Comments

  • tbulford said:
    I am not sure where the valuation of the industry in the article comes from. Are they measuring the sales and retail market or the games development market with a broader scope then we typically would.
    I believe that the root of this stat is from PWC. It's focused on the purchasing of games.
  • tbulford said:

    It's interesting that there are more and more courses been offered in game design.
    But few that actually have any value, if we're honest. I love what Wits is doing - and dammit, would they just move their course to UCT already? :P - but no other course I've seen has provided any near the same value. The Vega course (from what I've seen of the syllabus and talking to the coordinators) has the potential to at least compete with Wits, though it will have a more games-for-brands approach built in. We'll have to wait and see what actually comes of it though.

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  • Karuji said:

    I believe that the root of this stat is from PWC. It's focused on the purchasing of games.
    This may be the case I have asked Daryl if he is willing to comment here or at least give me feedback.
  • dammit said:

    But few that actually have any value, if we're honest.
    I don't think I could comment on the value of the various courses. I know of at least 2 people actively doing good work in the games industry that have studied at courses other then the Wits course. I think the best people to comment on the value of any given course must be people who have experience with them.
    dammit said:
    I love what Wits is doing
    So do I :)
    dammit said:
    The Vega course (from what I've seen of the syllabus and talking to the coordinators) has the potential to at least compete with Wits, though it will have a more games-for-brands approach built in. We'll have to wait and see what actually comes of it though.
    Personally I am happy to embrace the larger subset of the gaming industry. The games for brands, gambling and gamification projects will often have crossovers in terms of staff technical skills and businesses doing the work. It makes perfect sense to me for Vega to focus the course based on available industry work. As the games for entertainment industry grows I am would expect the courses will naturally redirect according to demand.
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  • Vega did post here asking for some input.

    They didn't really stick around to answer some more of the pointed questions.

    I would love to see more game design programmes, honestly. But unless they're done well it's just a waste of the students time and money. Their curriculum at a high level sounds quite cool, but honestly they're *definitely* going to have a hard time finding good teachers. If you can't find good teachers (experienced in making games) then you can't really expect the curriculum to A) be any good, because they don't know what they should teach and B) even if the curriculum is good, without a bunch of feedback from a place of experience on the students' work, they can only learn so much. Also based on their responses to the questions in that thread, they don't really understand how 'Game Design' is different from 'Graphic Design', which is usually a bad sign for the quality of the games that come out of a course - even if the learning in different fields is good :).

    There are very few people in South Africa that have the knowledge to teach this stuff, never mind the time/commitment to actually do it. Having people teaching with game design experience isn't such a huge problem if the curriculum is good though. I designed the 1st semester 3rd year Game Design course at Wits this year, and I can say that even just showing them 'Juice it or Lose it' can have a big impact on the quality of games that the students produce.

    The Wits course has suffered from the above problem. It knows what it *should* be teaching, but it just can't because it doesn't have the lecturers. This is changing lots in the next couple of years. Even just having graduated students tutoring classes has helped a lot :).

    I think generally as well MGSA has to do a lot more to bring students into the community to at least compensate for learning deficiencies - this certainly helped me as a student. Between all the courses over SA there are probably between 100-200 students learning some sort of Game development course, but probably less than 10 hang out here :)

    TL;DR: Yay for new courses! But there aren't enough people to teach this well so I'm concerned?
  • Thanks for making that link @Bensonance I will update the first post to include it.

    They didn't really stick around to answer some more of the pointed questions.
    Pity, hopefully they still considered them.

    I think generally as well MGSA has to do a lot more to bring students into the community to at least compensate for learning deficiencies - this certainly helped me as a student. Between all the courses over SA there are probably between 100-200 students learning some sort of Game development course, but probably less than 10 hang out here :)
    Perhaps we need to get someone to actively work with the facilities that do the training to encourage that. Of course from the facilities point of view it won't be encouraged if we just bashing the courses all the time (and I suspect the students in the courses would feel equally uncomfortable). We need to nurture our relationships with the various educational facilities to encourage them to in turn encourage their students to be here.

    I am not suggesting we don't consider the courses merits and weaknesses, but our approach to that has to be constructive and largely positive. No business would send its customers to a community that is actively and largely negative about their business.

    Yay for new courses! But there aren't enough people to teach this well so I'm concerned?
    Fair point and it emphasizes the importance of your point about trying to get the students aware of Makegames.
    Thanked by 1Bensonance
  • edited
    I've sent them a message offering to get a bit involved.

    I think an adgames focus is fine, it's where a lot of the work for hire is, and I think it might be the easiest path into making entertainment games (should that be a path the students even want to pursue).

    Maybe with a little encouragement they might in turn encourage their students to connect with the wider game development community?

    @Bensonance I'm actually not sure what we can do to get students to visit here and the in real life meetups? If they were posting things even on TIGSource or other communities that'd be great. Or holding their own game jams. But it seems like they aren't connecting with anyone (as far as I can tell)
    Thanked by 2Bensonance tbulford
  • edited
    Vega did post here asking for some input.

    They didn't really stick around to answer some more of the pointed questions.
    I've been in touch with them personally (all i had to do was DM the user who posted that originally) and have put them in touch with relevant industry people to check their syllabus and confirm that what they're doing is actually valuable for the industry. They've been more than open to feedback and I expect they are looking for suited lecturers. I'm guessing that if you want to get involved in lecturing, you'd need to get in touch with them.


    The biggest barrier, of course, to having good lecturers is the fact that the pay is going to be pretty low at Wits and elsewhere.
    Thanked by 1EvanGreenwood
  • tbulford said:
    dammit said:

    But few that actually have any value, if we're honest.
    I don't think I could comment on the value of the various courses. I know of at least 2 people actively doing good work in the games industry that have studied at courses other then the Wits course. I think the best people to comment on the value of any given course must be people who have experience with them.
    I'm merely commenting from the point of view of the CVs I've seen :P We've never hired a Wits graduate, we were quite happy with our UCT graduate (while he was here) and all our other programmers are self taught. Our artists come from a range of courses, but all generally agree that the courses are over priced and that self-teaching would be better value than what's out there locally.

  • edited
    Just wanted to thank @dammit for engaging with Vega.

    I'm going to try help as well (obviously I don't want to get in the way, but maybe there some complimentary help I can offer).

    As a weird idea, regarding the problem of low pay for lecturing, could IESA (or some other organisation) incentivise lecturing game design financially?
    Thanked by 2AngryMoose tbulford
  • edited
    @tbulford @EvanGreenwood I do think this is something that needs a bunch of investment. Going forward this is something I would like to see MGSA do more of. Although what entices students is as much a mystery to me, as it is to every else. I do have some theories though:

    I think in terms of actionable things to do: you have to run events where the students are. Events that are run at Wits and are endorsed/pushed by the staff have high attendance (even the French business workshop). In Joburg the meetups are , realistically, too far to encourage student attendance. Students are lazy/absent-minded too (no really). They aren't going to check MGSA all the time for meetup dates, so this is also a marketing problem - you have to put the marketing where the students will see it.

    Interestingly, the NAG Jam (which isn't really a great game jam) has a high amount of student attendance at WIts. More than half of the entries for both jams were from Wits students, and many of the placing games in the first jam were Wits games.

    Stuff like the monthly competitions are great, but I think they aren't necessarily that good for students that are making games as part of their course. *Very* few Wits students can afford the time to be making another game over the course a month when they're already making 1 or 2 games over the same period.

    I think getting students to post their games to MGSA should be a really big focus point. Most game dev students are already making games as part of their courses, but they aren't posting them here as you say. I think many feel they aren't 'ready' to post them here or that this forum 'isn't for students'. There are students at Wits making really excellent games at the moment, but they don't post them here for some reason.

    Student-focused events might be good too: I.E. "Student Game Jam" or "Student workshop" etc.

    @dammit That's good to hear they're open to feedback :). I think the pay for lecturing is actually pretty good - at Universities specifically, at least. Personally, I'm technically paid by Electrical Engineering and the pay for a part-time Game Design lecturer is as good as what I've seen for a full-time Junior Programming job :). You're paid less on the art side, of course, but it's not terrible pay at all. (Also you can order/get books for free, so).

    EDIT: I would suppose that under colleges the pay would be poorer maybe? I don't think colleges get as many subsidies from the government, so that might explain the lower pay.
    Thanked by 1tbulford
  • @Bensonance The NAG jam had some significant extrinsic awards attached, money and exposure at Rage. Expensive to repeat, but maybe worth doing now and then to encourage participation.

    (What about an EGE jam run by Make Games? With specific student prizes )

    I think the events at the campuses are a great idea, that's of course a lot of effort.

    Theming events as for students is interesting, I wonder if we could make this site have specific call outs to students? (Just to make it clear this forum is for students as well)
    Thanked by 2Bensonance tbulford
  • I saw an ad for a game dev lecturer at the Open Window that was paying something like R350k per year... and afaik they still struggled to find someone to fill the position. (They were hoping for someone who could teach art and code.)

    I think it's hard to coax someone away from actual industry work to teach, even if you throw more money at them (pretty much none of us get into this for the money, after all). But it could be a lot easier to get industry people to give a guest lecture now and then, or be present for some feedback occasionally (which is even easier, because there's no prep work).

    I've made an effort to go to games schools in both Joburg and UCT, but it's relatively rare that the school actually wants feedback on their course. And when they get it they don't seem to want to ask for it again. My bad, I guess? :P
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  • @bensonance - Perhaps I'm just thinking of Academia pay that I've been offered. Was less than I earned as an intern :/
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  • @EvanGreenwood Oh yes the NAG jam is definitely difficult to replicate - was just interested that it had such high student turnout.

    Honestly don't know about how an EGE jam would go - would probably be good if there was a student category - I dunno. As a student I always saw the biggest reward as getting feedback from cool practicing designers - I don't know if that's the case with other students.

    I think maybe even having a student category on MGSA could be cool. Even just to have a direct link to where other students are posting stuff? But I think generally, student specific stuff could help - even having a student winner for monthly compos could be a good start maybe?

    @Elyaradine Also trust me, there is nothing worse than marking student games D: . Especially in classes the size of 30 people with 4 prototypes and 3 iterations each... it's a hard ask :'D.

    I would love to see more guest lecturing happening :). I would like to see regular playtest evenings the the universities where students playtest their stuff - this would be a good time for industry people to come give feedback (but specific lecture times for feedback would also be cool) :).

    From the Wits side in terms of feedback on the course, I've always voiced my criticisms of the course often and lengthily, and the faculty have often made efforts to change the course. I think again though, getting feedback is a logistical problem. Often it's very difficult to implement feedback within the red tape of a university. For example: ideally I wouldn't want to have to mark my students' prototypes in terms of quality. A prototype is process work, really. But you have to mark students for something in a university block. Similarly, I would prefer to weight the overall percentage of the semester mark to the final submission (prototypes and everything else only matter in the context of making a good final game, in this perspective), but you have to weight the marks in a specific way for the university to accept it (50-50 for coursework and exams).

    Thanked by 1EvanGreenwood
  • Yeah, that was one of the things that I liked about being at The Open Window. I'd signed up for their game art course, and after the first quarter when I complained about it, they rebuilt the whole rest of the year's material, and hired a new lecturer (someone with a couple of years in the game industry under his belt) that I recommended, and it got way better. Or, at least, it got way better for me. (I found that while I benefited a lot, because I could ask questions and coax information out of him that I wanted/needed, other people were quite passive and didn't benefit much from his relatively care-free, laissez-faire teaching style.) So while it was a mixed experience overall, the fact that the school was willing and able to accommodate me with my complaints, and turned the entire course around in 2 weeks, teach the stuff that I said we needed to know (based on the research I was doing myself), and deal with the bureaucracy and stuff, says a lot about them to me. And it's not as if that's coming at the cost of not offering a degrees (up to honours level, if that's your thing).

    I can only imagine how frustrating it is to iterate on structures in an institution that's much older and entrenched in its systems. :/

    Anyway, I'm pretty excited to see the stuff you're putting into effect at Wits. :) I've always been asking "Who's the lecturer, and where's their game/art portfolio?", again and again whenever courses come up. I'm glad Wits has you to check that box. :P

    I'm keen to see who Vega's lecturer's going to be.
    Thanked by 1Bensonance


  • I think maybe even having a student category on MGSA could be cool. Even just to have a direct link to where other students are posting stuff? But I think generally, student specific stuff could help - even having a student winner for monthly compos could be a good start maybe?
    I really like this idea :) Could be just what's needed to help students feel like this is something they can participate in without feeling like there's no point when they're competing with industry vets.

    (I do know that it makes zero difference - but it's about student impressions and thinking rather than actual difference or likelihood of making a great game).
  • Interestingly, the NAG Jam (which isn't really a great game jam) has a high amount of student attendance at WIts. More than half of the entries for both jams were from Wits students, and many of the placing games in the first jam were Wits games.
    I am not sure why you quantify the jam as a not good one. Good turn out a nice reward, encouraged students to participate, media coverage. These are all good values. Potential international exposure may be a down point. Was this discussed previously perhaps I can just look there to see the points raised. No need to rehash them all.
  • @tbulford

    Lol we're really off topic right now :'D. I tweeted a long list of reasons, but can't find the tweet. Reasons:

    - Bad theme (really, I don't even know what to think of these themes. They're not mechanical constraints, they're not actual theming, they're just random phrases?)
    - Bad timing - a huge swathe of game jammers would have been at GDC during the 2nd jam
    - Opaque judging. For such huge prize pool, it's really not clear what they were looking for.
    - Bad turnout (2nd jam only had 6 entries

    I spoke about a bunch of other reasons it was bad. Basically though, for a huge prize pool it wasn't professional enough, but for just getting new people into making stuff, the stakes were too high/intimidating :).
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  • edited
    @tbulford I expect @Bensonance means aside from the rewards the jam didn't encourage participants to play each others' games (and the judging didn't offer feedback besides a writeup of the top few if I recall correctly?). So the jam would have been worse than normal for learning (which @Bensonance said he cared about). But if we ran the jam off of these forums this would not be a problem.

    That said, I think some rad games came out of the first NAG jam (especially from students).

    (Edit @Bensonance beat me to it)
    Thanked by 2Bensonance tbulford
  • I've just skimmed over most of this, but seeing @dammit's response to judging quality:
    I'm merely commenting from the point of view of the CVs I've seen :P We've never hired a Wits graduate, we were quite happy with our UCT graduate (while he was here) and all our other programmers are self taught. Our artists come from a range of courses, but all generally agree that the courses are over priced and that self-teaching would be better value than what's out there locally.
    I just wanted to mention that we have both a junior dev and a junior artist fresh out of the Wits program. We're in a uniquely privileged position in that we can spend time upskilling our dev, but I suspect if our needs weren't so specific (heavy use of C++ in an engine nowhere near as developed as Unity) we would be just fine with them as they came. I don't know how much of that is from the general engineering background, and how much from the game program specifically, but either way we're happy with the result.
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