Since I see that my blog has been linked by Melissa Miller in her 1up.com developer blog, and I figured I might get 2 or 3 readers from outside the industry (and thus doubling my readership!), I decided to make an entry on one of my current favorite subjects, which is education and games.

Early Education and Games
Frequently at the behest of either parents or teachers, I've been asked to talk to kids about what they should do as youngsters to help them realize a dream of making games. I think it's really cool that this is a dream of so many kids, and parents are inevitably pleased when I give them the following, honest advice: stay in school, do well and study hard.

As you can imagine, this is not the answer the kids are hoping for (though it inevitably pleases the parents). They want me to tell them that the best thing they can do is play lots of games. And I realized that my answer wasn't completely fair. While excelling in school is indeed vital for most game disciplines, playing games and being fluent in their language is also important. So I've changed my tune a little recently. I tell them that playing games is great, but that they should think about how they play games, and how the games they play function. Many kids are already writing their own game reviews and such on their websites, so this resonates.

I also tried something new recently, which is that I asked a group of third graders whether they had ever created a game. While I expected a tepid response, instead I got a response that was nearly unanimous. These kids invented games like crazy, and couldn't wait to tell me about them. This validation of their creativity was the most impactful thing I said to them during the whole hour I talked to them.

I want to pint out one other thing too, which might be a little controversial, and brings this discussion full circle a bit. I was speaking to a group of students at the Polytechnic school in Pasadena, which is a group whose parents are very serious about education, and the kids are high-achievers, even in the third grade. As you might expect, many of these kids live under extremely strict media consumption guidelines. Though the sample I spoke to was totally unscientific and should be considered anecdotal, I noticed the following:
- Kids with unlimited media consumption tended to ape what they'd seen and played in commercial games
- Kids with limited media consumption seemed to have very creative play
- Kids with little or no media consumption just seemed lost in the conversation

To me this is a strong argument for balance, especially with younger kids. By keeping what kids do diverse, it makes both their play and study purposeful, rather than habitual. So in fact, both are important. Study hard, but play games too, and as part of your play, invent games on your own as well!

Post-Secondary Education and Games
This is where the action is. In the US, "post-secondary" basically means any education you get after high school. Just in the last several months I have joined advisory boards for two post-secondary institutions who are establishing game programs. I'd be pleased to join one or two more, if the opportunity presents itself, because this is something I care about very much.

While we have always as an industry had at least a grudging understanding of the importance of education particularly in the programming field, I believe that there is a meaningful and important role for post-secondary education in all areas, particularly game design.

The paths to good education for programming and art are not that complicated. I will say however the following:
- If you are studying programming for games, do not neglect your mathematics. Indepth knowledge of calculus, trigonometry, and especially linear algebra is vitally important to all areas of game programming.
- If you are studying art or animation, don't get addicted to the computer. Skills in traditional media will make you more flexible and adaptable as needs change, and a great traditional portfolio will differentiate you in the job search process.

Game Design Education
I'm going to tell a dirty little secret, which is that game designers are deeply insecure professionals. Because game design is so poorly defined, designers very frequently feel threatened, especially mid-level designers. Thus the idea that someone can get trained in college, rather than the school of hard knocks we faced, seems scary as well as presumptuous. Happily, I think we're getting over that. Now we just have to figure out how to actually educate people in game design.

Much of the emphasis in current programs is very practical. Learn the Unreal engine or whatever, and learn to make levels. While that's all fine, I really just think that's redundant with entry-level experience, except you have to pay for it instead of the other way round.

Rather, I think game design education should focus on knowledge and skills that are least likely to be picked up in the course of daily work. In a college setting you have opportunity to do two things that are pretty impractical in a work setting:
1. Study the theory of game play, including both book learning, and also playing games and thinking deeply about their meaning, their formal elements, etc.
2. Study disciplines which are strongly relevant to game design, but not part of everyday work.

I'll give some examples of both.

Game Theory
There are some really good resources developing regarding game theory. The strongest are textbooks by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, whose Rules of Play is in my opinion the best textbook I've read. It's incredibly densely written, and I don't recommend trying to read it cover to cover. Skip around a bit, especially after the first few chapters. You'll likely not understand much of it, but this stuff sticks with you, and eventually becomes relevant.

Blogs and online publications can be pretty good too. Clint Hocking (http://clicknothing.typepad.com) has a habit of writing pretty compelling and interesting stuff. Though he's pretty focused on MMO games, Raph Koster (http://www.raphkoster.com) is famous for his frequent updates and interesting perspective. And it doesn't hurt to dig thoroughly through the archives at Gamasutra.com. There are some gems there.

I've been very impressed by the students from the program at USC who have done "game deconstructions" which I've attended. They're interesting and also rigorous. Though many of these kids are just undergrads, it's some of the most thoughtful game criticism I've seen. These guys are really onto something in terms of trying to see a game's themes and formal elements, and though they can't seem to resist giving numerical scores (eventually we'll put that all behind us), still I've been really impressed. Schools would do very well to emulate this process, using ideas from authors and theorists applied to games to talk about why they are compelling, frustrating, or interesting.

Alternate Disciplines
One of my big frustrations with on-the-job trained designers is that they frequently have too narrow a set of knowledge and experiences, and it hurts them when they need to really think creatively or understand novel concepts. I fear that strictly educated designers will have the same problem, and this is a missed opportunity.

Foremost, I'd like to see more designers educated in the idea of design. Design is a phenomenally broad field, and lessons learned in making cars, user interfaces or even kitchen implements are so often applicable to games as well. Design is about understanding the interaction between humans and the objects that surround us. Find and read Donald Norman's wonderful book The Design of Everyday Things. Study of design can be in almost any area: automotive design, landscape architecture, even more technical design disciplines like ergonomics. All of this will give a game designer practice in the thought processes behind design.

It really goes without saying that designers will benefit from training in art or technology as well, but I assume that decent training programs include this.

Designers should also consider study in psychology, or cognitive science. One of the most powerful lessons about videogames is that games are all about the process of learning, about tapping into our innate almost addictive love of learning and mastery. Understanding the theory of learning might help the next great game designer to focus her ideas into something amazing. After reading psychologist Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi's seminal book Flow, USC's Jenova Chen created one of the more interesting student projects of the year (also called Flow).

Waiting for Godot
I'm happy to say, I'm starting to get pretty old. And I'm excited by the people I'm seeing emerge from modern game development education programs. I find their frustrations frankly just as encouraging as their excitement - high expectations will help these kids get the most out of the few years they get to really learn and grow, before they have the distraction of actually making a game holding them back.

Even more, I look forward to the day when a kid goes to college, studies videogames, then decides to go to law school, or to teach high school or something, without even giving it a second thought. Because if you've read this far, you believe like I do that games are as valid a form of human expression as anything else we study and award degrees for understanding.

That will totally rock.

One of my favorite questions right now about games, is "are games art?". Well, of course games can be art, but this got me thinking that it's worthwhile looking at this in a formal way. How can games be categorized in terms of their artistic content/intent? And what is art anyway?

This idea has led me to some very interesting places. But more on that in a bit.

First, a quick definition of art. Any definition of art will be extremely slippery, so I won't try to be nuanced. I'll just say the following:
Art is a creative expression which can change the way in which the consumer of it views the world.

There is one other statement which is not necessarily part of a good definition of art, but is important to this conversation, and that is that to be art, an expression must have an intent of being art. Intentionality is another of those slippery concepts vis-à-vis art, so I'll just let the statement stand. Argue it in private, if you wish. (Though it is an excellent argument, methinks...)

When considering art by this definition, I think it's clear that modern video games are in fact, nearly always art. At least those that we think of as large scale, commercial games, generally use sophisticated fictions, which are a crucial element of presenting the player with a view of a world outside his or her familiar circle. And the intentionality is clear: games fictions are created by designers, writers, and production designers who are highly skilled.

(Please bear in mind that this definition does not encompass issues of quality. Quality, whether art succeeds or fails, is the realm of critics. Though it's something that should always be analyzed, quality should not be considered requisite to the medium being considered art.)

What separates games from being considered an art form by the broader culture (notably Roger Ebert), is in my opinion a confluence of several factors:

1. History of Intent. Games have not historically had a particularly artistic intent. The games that Ebert played as a youngster may have had no artistic intent whatsoever. Whether art emerged inevitably from their desire to engage and entertain is an interesting and fun question. But lack of artistic intent in the early coin-op era makes those games an easy target.



2. Lack of Quality in Traditional Areas. If a film critic were to watch most game cinematics, they'd rightly conclude that it's a bunch of crap. You and I know that this is merely ancillary to the overall art of the medium. But that's difficult to explain to non-players.



3. Lack of a Critical Tradition. Perhaps the only thing more pathetic than game cinematics in terms of quality is the state of game criticism. What passes for game criticism today is more like overrated buyer's guides than genuine attempt at understanding aesthetics or meaning.



4. Diversity of Games. There are a tremendous number of ways that games can be presented, and not all of them should really be thought of together with one another. A first person shooter is so fundamentally different from a puzzle game, it's almost sloppy to even call them part of the same artistic medium. Often, we can't even decide if a product is even a game (such as Brain Age or Trauma Center). Being considered a monolithic medium is a mistake.

All of the above are of course compounded by the fact that games are such a young medium. And, I believe all of them will resolve with time. As critics age and evolve, along with the game makers themselves, and very importantly as academia takes an increasing interest in games, the recognition of the broader community will come. I believe this is inevitable, and I suspect that is a common belief.

I think that one of the above issues however is a bit tricky and best addressed from within the industry itself, and that is the issue of diversity. I'm certainly not suggesting that diversity in games be decreased – indeed I hope for just the opposite. But it seems to me that we will help ourselves greatly by creating tools for defining games into categories which help us to argue the artistic merits of them.

I began this a bit with my 'definition of genre' posts. I think that considering how a game creates a user experience to be primary rather than what it contains is a very useful step in the right direction for the purpose of criticism and understanding.

I'd like to take a completely different step however, which focuses more on artistic intent, and I think presents a way of looking at games that can communicate their artistic nature in a way that's not only useful to developers and critics, but also to the public as a whole. Maybe even Roger Ebert.

I call this tool the "game triangle", and it will be explored in the next post.