Question: Who owns the IP rights to games that are created by students?

What to look for: Ideally, the students should own all copyright and other intellectual property ownership of the projects they create while they are students.

What to do: Decide if this matters to you. Some people don't care, because they aren't planning on selling anything they make as a student anyway. Some people care, but they're willing to compromise on this (maybe by just not using their favorite game ideas until after they graduate) in order to go to a school that is otherwise their choice. For some people, this is a deal-killer.

What to watch out for: Some schools explicitly state that they own all rights to all student work. Probably the most notorious example of this was Team Toblo (a good story to read for why IP ownership might matter to you as a student). Other schools do not have an official policy at all, which is a signal that they haven't thought about it yet in spite of it being a legal and PR minefield. In these cases, proceed with caution, because the rights may be legally unclear and the last thing you need as a student is to get involved in a legal battle. Still other schools have restrictions: they own the rights to anything you create using university resources (such as computer labs or printers), but a project you make on your own with your own equipment is 100% yours, so there's a way to own your work if it matters to you. Mainly, the important thing is to be aware of the official policy before it becomes an issue... and if you think the policy is suboptimal and you plan on attending anyway, consider taking it upon yourself to push for policy change.

Update 11/13/2008: The monthly IGDA column on legal issues gives some insight into IP ownership rights of student work: http://www.igda.org/columns/lastwords/lastwords_Nov08.php
Thanks, Jim!

Update 11/14/2008: It appears this is becoming a much larger discussion. A recent Gamasutra article highlights the problem. This blog post is quoted and linked to in the article, alongside quotes from Tom Buscaglia, Brenda Brathwaite and Susan Gold... so I'm in good company. Maybe this will eventually become a big enough issue that the "we own your IP" schools will consider policy changes, and the schools without an official policy will get off their behinds and make their policy explicit.

Question: Can I see a syllabus for some of the game classes this school offers?

What to look for: In the syllabus, see if the topics are specific to games, or more generalized to other media. If you want to make games, specifically, then you'll want classes that have readings and homeworks that involve games -- not movies, not literature, and not the World Wide Web. Of course, the reverse is true if you want game development to be only one option of many.

What to do: Look through the syllabi that you receive, paying close attention to the assignments (readings and projects). If there is a textbook, find it at your local library or book store and skim through it. If a syllabus is not available, ask some students who have taken the classes if they might have an old one; at the very least, ask them if the class is about video games or if that's only part of it. Also search the public website; occasionally you'll find that certain parts of a course are unrestricted access.

What to watch out for: A lot of classes (and majors!) have titles that sound like they focus on games, but then you find out that they don't. A few examples (feel free to post others in the comments):

• Nonlinear Storytelling. This might be a class about interactive stories in video games. Or, it might deal with stories in other media that are told out of order, like the movies Memento and Pulp Fiction.
• Digital Media Production. Could mean game production, in the sense of actually creating a video game. Or it could be game production in the sense of teaching you how to be a producer (dealing with scheduling and budgets). Or it could be either of those things for other media, like movie production. Or it could be special effects, like audio/video post-production for movies.
• Introduction to Interactive Multimedia. This might be an obfuscated way to say "intro to video games" or it might be a class in Web page design or Flash programming.

In short, if you know exactly what you want from your program of study, make sure you're going to get it!

Question: How diverse is the student game developer population in this school, overall? How about the top 10% or so?

What to look for: Ideally, you'd like to see a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and demographics, but in most cases you won't. At least shoot for more diverse than the game industry.

What to do: Schools generally know the demographics of their student body. They also know who the top students are. Not all schools put the two together to see how they overlap, so you might have to do some detective work on your own. Grades of individual students are confidential (as well they should be), but you can see if the Dean's List is public, and then take a guess based on names and any other information that happens to be there. When you visit campus (you are going to see the place for yourself before you commit to spending four years of your life there, aren't you?), you can also get qualitative information from existing students.

What to watch out for: If all of the students in the program look like they were all cloned from the same genetic material, it could mean several things. It could be that the school is actively selecting people that fit specific criteria, which could signal that they're more interested in being a factory that churns out degrees than actually caring about you as an individual. It could be that the school has difficulty attracting women and minorities, which means you'll be less sensitive to diversity issues than you should be if you're white/male/straight, and you'll be feeling slightly uncomfortable (at best!) if you're not. If the student body within game development is diverse as a whole, but the top students are all white/male/straight, then that suggests the program is set up to reward certain types of students -- likely because the faculty look like clones, even if the students aren't.

In general, a diverse population means that a wide variety of people can succeed at the school. Without it, the implication is that exactly one type of student succeeds, the one who can Fit In Here And Be Just Like Everyone Else. If you feel like you'll fit right in, this might be okay... but take a Women's Studies or Minority Studies course anyway, will ya?

Students choose schools for all kinds of reasons. At the community college level, it's often based on proximity to home more than anything else. With four-year schools, it could be anything from geographic location to campus size to how pretty the campus looks to which school one's boyfriend/girlfriend is attending. It's easy to ignore the quality of the school.

Complicating things further, schools have a process set up where you have to apply to attend there, which immediately puts the prospective student in a position of perceived weakness. After all, you can't attend at all unless they say you can. If you are accepted, you should thank your lucky stars (because there's a line out the door and around the block of people waiting to take your place) and not ask any questions. Interviews for game industry jobs can feel similar to first-timers.

If you're a student looking at game schools, it's worth remembering a few things:

• You're paying an extreme cost in time (4+ years) and money (more than a new car, unless you have really expensive taste in cars). It's one of the largest expenses you'll have in your lifetime.
• You wouldn't buy a new car without at least kicking the tires and taking a test drive. You wouldn't buy a house without taking a tour and getting it professionally inspected. Do your due diligence the same way you would for any other big-ticket item.
• Screw this up and you'll graduate with a degree that makes you unemployable. Or you'll drop out and owe tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for no degree. Think about your next steps after you're done with school, and realize that your options change based on your school experience. It's worth taking the time up front to make sure you'll get what you're looking for.

I've already given a few things for you to consider when choosing a school, but I think it's worth including some things you should not consider too much. One of the common themes of recruiters is to show off cool-looking student projects.

Be wary of student projects. At the DDAF, almost every presenter on the Education Panel showed a lot of work from their past and present students. The work looks impressive, and the implication is "we'll show you how to make something cool like this." But when I thought about it, it didn't really tell me anything about the school itself.

Every school has a few brilliant students who will produce phenomenal work, on their own, with or without faculty assistance. The work certainly reflects on the quality of that particular student, but may or may not have any correlation to the quality of the academic program.

It's also easy to get distracted by quantity. Some schools have large programs and lots of students, so they will likely have more student work to show than a smaller school. Take the size of the program into account.

Also be wary if the most impressive student work is more than a year or two old. Schools with quality programs and a steady stream of incoming students should be producing cool stuff every year. Showing one or two works from four years ago is an indication that the school just had a handful of outstanding students that year, not that they have a great program now.

Lastly, if the student work isn't similar to your area of interest, that should be a red flag. For example, if you want to be a game designer or a programmer and the only student work available is animated video clips (not playable games), you're probably dealing with an art/animation program that doesn't focus on games.

I'm not saying you should ignore student work entirely. But treat it the way a hiring manager at a company would treat personal references for a job. The applicant chose their best references so of course they're all going to say great things, so this shouldn't really persuade you. But if someone applying for a position can't even find a decent friend or two that can say something nice without reservations, maybe that's a signal you should be looking elsewhere.

Question: What is your job placement rate out of all incoming freshmen? (This is tricky, and you might have to do the math yourself. Figure out the percentage of incoming freshmen make it all the way through the program and graduate, and multiply by the percentage of graduates who get jobs.)

What to look for: High numbers. What's good? I actually don't know. It's relative.

What to do: Compare the numbers of several schools.

What to watch out for: Schools that boast abnormally high job placement rate of their graduates... but only because their program is so obscenely difficult that only a tiny fraction of incoming students actually make it through. Or, schools that have low placement rates in the industry (indicating they aren't taken seriously by people who know how to judge talent and ability). Or, schools that can't tell you their placement rate because they don't track those numbers (indicating that the school might not care about you in the long term, as long as they get your tuition money today). Or, schools that inflate their job placement rate by encouraging students to start their own studios fresh out of college -- make sure their people are being hired by someone else, not themselves (I have nothing against starting your own studio, but if it happens too often at a particular school that's an indication that a lot of their graduating class couldn't get jobs at established companies that were hiring).

Question: Who are your faculty?

What to look for: Industry experience, doing work that is related to the classes they are teaching. Preferably at least one teacher who did the job that you want to get yourself some day.
What to do: Again, verify. Look up credits on Mobygames for games that were published. If a professor can't explain to you exactly what work they did on each title they worked on, find out yourself if you can, and view with extreme suspicion if you can't. Ditto if the school (or a particular professor) says they worked on "lots of games" but can't tell you which ones.

What to watch out for: There are a lot of "teachers" out there who are supposed to teach you how to make games even though they've never made one themselves. Would you want to learn how to cook from someone who's never been in a kitchen (no matter how many cookbooks they've read)? Would you pay money to take music lessons from someone who's never picked up an instrument? Would you take a skydiving course from someone who has never been in a plane? Someone with no experience can teach you the theory from a textbook, but they won't be able to guide you any further... and with so many bad textbooks out there, how would they know that what they're teaching is even valid?

At the DDAF this week, I saw a lot of high school and community college students who were interested in studying games. I was actually a bit disappointed with the Education panel; great representation from six schools that have game development programs, but it basically amounted to each school giving a 15-minute recruitment pitch, with no one actually commenting on what to look for in a school or how to find the program that's right for you.

In fairness, "how to choose a school" isn't necessarily what the panel was supposed to be. But it struck me that a lot of students in the audience were skipping a few steps in the process, and would benefit from some more basic information, like what criteria are important in school selection, and even how to know if they should be considering a game school in the first place.

So, I was inspired to start writing a series of questions that are worth asking. If you're a student, I hope these will help you in selecting the best academic program to fit your needs. If you're an educator, give some thought to how you'd answer these questions, and if your program would stack up favorably. If you're in the industry... well, this might not be of much use unless you're on an advisory board for some college or university, but if you ever get asked by a father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate about what's the best school to go to, you'll have at least one URL to send back.

To start things off:

Question: What degree do you offer, what classes do you offer in that degree, and what jobs will that qualify me for?

What to look for: You should see a lot of classes, not just a traditional Art or Computer Science curriculum with a couple of "game" courses tacked on (this is assuming you're looking for a game-focused curriculum). You should see at least one course where you're working with people outside your major -- if you're an artist, you should be working with programmers. Obviously, the courses should be in your area of interest.

What to do: Verify that the school is giving good information. Check out the IGDA Curriculum Framework and see if the school's curriculum is in the general ballpark. Read the IGDA Breaking In website, and see if the courses you'd take are related in any way to the job you'd be doing.

What to watch out for: Some schools call their course of study "game design" even though it is actually a programming or game art curriculum. If the school does not know the simple difference between the various fields of game development, how valid is your education really going to be? Also, a lot of students haven't yet discovered their area of interest; they equate game development with playing games, or at least they haven't figured out that there are many fields of study. Know your own passion before you go to school for it.

Wrapping up my series on the game design curriculum, I wanted to suggest some game design classes. You can't have a game design major without some classes that focus on game design, right?
(I realize these are not practical for students who may have no control over their university's curriculum. That's why I saved this section for last.)

Since these courses aren't standardized anywhere, I'm making up the names as I go.

Game Industry Survey. Game design students, especially, need some kind of survey class that talks about the important people, companies and games that every developer (whether a designer or not) should know; and also, an overview of the types of companies and jobs found in the game industry. As I said earlier, you should have at least one minor related to another area of game development, so this course would help you decide which area to minor in.

Theory of Game Design. Every game designer wants to have their own Grand Unifying Theory Of What Makes Games Fun. Most of them are useless. A precious few have gained acceptance (or at least acknowledgement) within the industry: LeBlanc's MDA, Koster's Theory of Fun, Bartle's player types, and some others. Students should be introduced to the prevailing theories of what Fun is, where it comes from, and how to make it.

Core Systems Design, Creative Design and Level Design. Those of us in the industry largely learned game design by doing it; the same is true for artists in other media. The bulk of game design courses in school, then, should be practical and not theoretical. I would envision several "pure" design courses where students are given a set of projects, each with their own constraints. Students then create designs, test them and iterate on them, ideally under the watchful eye of an experienced designer who provides guidance. By "Core Systems Design" I mean creating the basic rules of the core of a game; "Creative Design" would deal with the design of characters, plots and storylines, and UI; and "Level Design" is, well, level design.

Technical Design. A designer should have some experience in the left-brained side of their field. This course would include some Game Theory (prisoner's dilemma, payoff matrices, stuff like that), some applications of mathematics in game design (e.g. solving intransitive games, use of triangular numbers in games), and some basic understanding of numerical methods and computation (for example, what the difference is between integers and floating points... and why Hit Points -- and most numbers in a game, in fact -- should be integer).

Prototyping. As far as I can tell, the only people in the entire game industry who like to see 500-page "Design Bibles" are Producers and Publishers, because it gives them the impression that work is being done. Designers don't like them because they take a long time to write and they're impossible to maintain halfway through the project, and the written word is static while most game systems you're documenting are dynamic. Programmers don't like them because reading a massive design doc is boring, confusing, and obsolete as soon as the designers stop maintaining it. A far better way to communicate and "document" living systems is with a prototype, whether it be in the form of a paper boardgame or an actual computer program. Designers should be able to whip up a quick prototype of a small system (say, a subscreen or a turn-based combat model) in Flash or a similarly "light" scripting language, even if they don't know C++ or Java.

Team-Based Game Development. This wouldn't be a game design class per se, but an interdisciplinary class where students work together in moderately-sized teams to create a full game or game demo. Of all disciplines, game designers cannot exist alone; they need to learn to work well with programmers and artists. Luckily, finding strong programmers and artists who want to make games isn't that hard at most universities :). If you look hard enough you can usually even find one student who's skilled enough at game audio, and maybe another student for production (or the teacher can act as producer). This course might also be called a "capstone" or a "portfolio-building" class.

For what it's worth, this year I'm teaching Game Industry Survey; plus a Prototyping course (my university calls it Game Development) and an advanced variant that will be closer to what I'm calling Core Systems Design; and a 20-week Team-Based Game Development class (we're calling it a Capstone), and something else (TBD) in the Spring. So, I'm practicing what I preach here.

The sad fact is, almost no one gets a game design job immediately on graduation. Most people enter the industry as a programmer, an artist, or a software tester. The reason for this, I think, is that those positions are inherently low risk: a programmer or artist who screws up their entry-level work is probably not going to sink the entire multimillion-dollar project; another programmer or artist will clean up the mess and no one else will notice. (A tester, by definition, can at worst do nothing.)

But a designer's job is, essentially, to tell the programmers and artists what to do. Design mistakes don't just require another designer to make repairs, but also programmers and artists to redo their work. Design mistakes bleed across departments, so companies tend to be very careful of who they hire in those positions.

As such, anyone interested in game design should also minor in Computer Science, Art, Business, Marketing, or some other discipline that is directly related to game development. This gives you three ways to enter the industry: game design (unlikely), QA (easier to find, but tedious and boring to most people), and whatever you minored in. Understanding multiple disciplines also makes you marginally more attractive to a game company (especially a small one), since you can fill more than just one role and you're more likely to communicate well with people in different departments.

Additionally, take a second minor in something that has nothing at all to do with games. Game designers need to foster a lifelong passion for learning (just look at all the crazy stuff that Will Wright or Sid Meier knows – the stuff that has nothing to do with games – like astrobiology or world history). I know, I know… most educational institutions do their best to squash the love of learning out of every last student. That makes it all the more important to reverse the trend in college, by studying in-depth something that really interests you. It could be anything; astronomy, art history, classics, Shakespeare, French, quantum physics, whatever. There are many reasons why this will help you. First, it will set you apart from others by giving you unique interests. Second, it demonstrates your all-important love of learning. Third, it gives you a small, random chance to be a perfect fit on any given dev team (example: if you minored in abnormal psych and unbeknownst to you, the company you’re applying to happens to be in negotiations on a game with a paranoid schizophrenic as the main character…).

Two minors? Sounds crazy, but in a field with practically no entry-level positions open to new graduates I consider it a necessity.

There are a few other assorted courses that I've found useful in the field.

Communication. No matter how good your high-level designs are, you must communicate your vision to the rest of the team. Having solid communication skills is one of the most important aspects of being a designer. If your school has a class in active listening, take that too -- designers tend to receive lots of feedback from their team (mostly on how much their design sucks :-), and being able to listen effectively and deduce the real design problems from someone who isn't a designer is a great skill to have.
Microeconomics. Really, anyone that wants to work for a company of any sort should understand the basics of supply and demand. Like it or not, game companies are businesses and they therefore need to make money if you want to continue receiving a paycheck. This course will prevent you from saying embarassing things in company meetings, like “we should make our game engine open-source and stop charging people for it, we'd get more players then.”
Women’s Studies. Currently, the game industry is really terrible at dealing with women. First, it’s lousy at attracting women to the industry; the average game company is about 10% women, and it’s even worse if you just look at game designers. Second, it’s not so great at marketing to women; the number of female gamers is growing, yes, but if you look at game ads and game magazines (and some games, too) you still see chainmail bikinis and the like. Game developers (especially male ones) need to understand some fundamental truths about women if we ever want to make them feel welcome. I sincerely hope that some day, this problem will be fixed and I’ll be able to remove this course from my proposed game design curriculum.

If we accept that learning art will help you to communicate with artists, then learning some computer science should help you communicate with programmers.

Intro to Programming. Some aspects of game design are pretty technical; if game data or rules are stored in a scripting language (either a commercial one like Python or Lua, or a proprietary one) then it is often expected that a designer will be creating content in those languages, which requires at least some fundamental knowledge of programming. Since you do want a solid foundation, take the course for CS majors if they'll let you.
Data Structures and Algorithms. I don’t feel that a single, introductory programming course is enough to truly understand how to convert ideas into code. A course dedicated to algorithms will give you a better idea of how that’s done, and a course dedicated to data structures will give you some tools that’ll make certain problems much easier.

Now we cover the really creative stuff. How much art do you need to be a designer?

Intro to Art or Intro to Architecture. Two reasons for this. First, some aspects of game design are pretty artistic, so understanding the basis of art can give you some perspective (or architecture, since designers are effectively architects: instead of creating blueprints and plans for building a structure, they create blueprints and plans for building a game). Second, you’ll be working with artists, and being able to understand some small part of what they do will help you communicate better with them.
Computer Art. Take a course that requires you to use the tools that artists need to use on the job (currently this would be either 3DSMax, Maya, or Photoshop). Again, this lets you communicate better with artists on your team, and lets you express your ideas more visually.
Improvisational Acting. You learn three things in this class, all useful skills to have as a designer: creativity; thinking fast; and making the other people on your team look good.

By now you might be wondering if game design is a purely technical field. No, I promise, there are plenty of arts (fine and otherwise) in the field.

Writing. Designers write. A lot. If you can’t stand writing, seriously, you might consider entering the industry through a different field. Anyone who writes a lot needs to start with a foundational course in college-level writing.
Creative Writing. Designers are the ones who write the text that goes in the game: backstory, storyline, character dialogue, and related stuff. Designers are also asked to write formal game proposals, which involve a bit of creative writing.
Technical Writing. Designers write two types of documents, primarily, that are technical in nature (that is, their purpose is to convey information rather than to entertain). These are the design document, and the game manual. If you ever wondered why no one reads the manual, it's because most manuals are not written very well, because the writer did not have a solid grounding in technical writing.

As with math, the creative field of game design doesn't intuitively seem to require a strong scientific background. But if we've already established that math is useful, science shouldn't be too much of a stretch from there.

Physics I. As I mentioned when I was there, any game that uses physics (and there are many of them) requires knowledge of kinematics. Taking the rest of the sequence (heat, fluids, electromagnetism) is not necessary, as those aren’t used in games nearly as much.
Biology I and Chemistry I. Some aspects of game design are scientific in nature (consider that an advanced prototype that asks the question “is this particular mechanic fun?” is essentially a scientific experiment), so a basic understanding of the scientific method is useful. A good basic Biology and Chemistry class will teach you about the basis and methods of science. A bad class will just make you memorize a bunch of stuff and not tell you why it’s useful at all, but at least it gives you the opportunity to meet some Bio/Chem majors who can explain it to you if you ask. Your best bet is probably an intro course for non-majors, if one is offered at your school.

When I mention math to most college students who are interested in design, it comes as a surprise to them. Game design is a creative field, and creativity and math go together about as well as, um, chocolate and broccoli. Right?

Except that any time you hear the words "game balance" (as in, "this game isn't balanced" or "I need to tweak the balance of this level") you're really talking about math. Game balance means that the game is neither too difficult nor too easy, and while it can be done by trial and error, it goes much faster if the designer can put together some good mathematical models. Game balance is the designer's job, so a good designer needs to know at least enough math for that.

Two examples should suffice. In Civilization , each unit has its own cost, strength, defense, speed and several other numerical stats. If those numbers are out of whack, then players will find one particular unit type (or strategy) to be better than any other, and the game will quickly become boring. Similarly, in Final Fantasy (or any RPG of your choice), there's typically a huge database of numbers: monster stats, player stats, level progression charts, combat formulas and so on. Those are all math, and they all need to be designed.

So, what math does a designer need? I've found the following courses helpful:

Calculus. Calculus teaches you the math to describe and analyze how fast something is changing. It is therefore necessary if you’re trying to describe a variable in a game that changes over time. If you’ve ever heard talk of game “pacing” or the “difficulty curve” of a game, that’s calculus. Also, the entire field of Physics is based on calculus, so taking Calc will help greatly in your understanding of Physics (I'll talk more about Physics, and science in general, in a later post).
Linear Algebra. This gives you the tools to solve systems of equations using matrices, which is useful when you have several variables or stats in your game that you need to relate to each other. It’s also useful for solving certain types of game-balance problems, like Rock-Paper-Scissors-like ("intransitive") game mechanics. It’s also used in computer graphics for rotation and scaling, which you might encounter at some point.
Intro to Probability. The field of Probability was created to study games (gambling games in particular), so this shouldn't be much of a surprise. Any game with randomness requires probability to describe the exact nature of that randomness. Rating systems (or any other form of player ranking) also require probability, to show if they’re fair or not.
Intro to Game Theory. Sadly, “Game Theory” has very little to do with game design; it’s a branch of mathematics that deals with particular kinds of probability questions (particularly those that involve multiple players making simultaneous choices). If you’ve ever heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, that’s game theory. It’s useful when designing certain types of multiplayer dynamics, especially in boardgames or strategic computer games.

To my knowledge, there are two previous attempts by the game industry to come up with a curriculum. I do promise to start writing about my own ideas soon, but first I'd like to comment on what has come before.

Tom Sloper doesn't exactly give a curriculum, but does give a list of courses he feels are necessary for a game designer to take. While I agree with Mr. Sloper on many points, this is not one of them. Realistically, there is no way an undergraduate can take all those courses and still major in anything, while still graduating in four (or even five) years. It's just too much. Also, he doesn't give the reasoning behind why those courses are supposedly important; from the list, I suspect he was considering the skills needed to design popular games. You can't design Civilization without having a strong background in history, so sure, all game designers should study history. But... what if you're working on Guitar Hero ? Now those history courses don't seem so useful.

The field of game design is already broad enough that we're specializing: very few people are good at story design and level design and core systems design and technical design, even without expecting that every designer is somehow equally skilled to work on an FPS and a Tycoon Sim and a historical turn-based strategy game.


The other group working on building a curriculum is the IGDA, and they've put quite a bit of effort into their curriculum framework. This document has the lofty ambition of defining fields of study for all disciplines in game development, not just game design. As such, it is necessarily more high-level and abstract than I'm looking for here. Also, for game design it focuses on design-specific topics (core systems, emergent complexity, feedback loops, risk/reward cycles and so on) but doesn't draw any associations with existing courses in other departments. It doesn't say how much math a game designer should be taking, or how many courses in psychology or philosophy or history or what not, nor what kinds. The curriculum framework is an excellent starting place when thinking of how one would go about teaching a course with the words "Game Design" in the title, but it does not define a full liberal arts curriculum as I wish to do.

Some universities are trying to build entire game design departments with large heapings of course offerings. But if you're at a university that doesn't have a dozen game design faculty, what do you do? In the next post, I will start answering that question.