It's the little things like this that I'd never anywhere else, that remind me why I like teaching so much. Paraphrasing a couple of students:

A: "So, from your definition of the word 'game,' real life would be a game."
B: "Yes, I think life is a game."
A: "Then, is death Game Over or just a checkpoint?"

Matt Sakey says:
One of the challenges for a games-based classroom is transitioning learners from their onscreen experiences to real world applications. A game that teaches algebra should keep that fact well-hidden. Kids immediately get suspicious when threatened with something that seems too much like a learning tool. Instead, conceal the algebra training inside an economic or management sim along the lines of Zoo Tycoon (which conveniently would also teach about animals, basic geometry, problem solving, etc.), and ramp it up gently. But at some point you have to help the learner make the mental connection, the “oh wow” moment… to realize, essentially, that skills learned in interactive zoo management work in life as well.

That "oh wow" moment is key for learning, but not just for game-based learning as Matt suggests. It's critical to draw the parallels between what you're doing in a classroom and how it's actually used in the Real World, whether you use games or not. Without that connection, you run into all sorts of problems:

• Students learn rote facts and methods without understanding them in a broader context. When it comes time to apply their classroom knowledge, they'll have to go back and learn it again, because they never thought before of how to actually use it.
• Humans are inherently good at understanding and remembering stories, moreso than random factoids. Course content is the latter; showing how it's used is the former. Without the context, it's harder and more inefficient for students to learn the material.
• More to the point, a lot of students won't even pay attention if they don't see the value. If your class is perceived as just being an arbitrary hoop to jump through so your students can get a piece of paper, let's just say that you're not going to have your students passionately learning your subject.

And honestly, students are hungry for this understanding. If you teach a class, try this, if you don't already. One day, just take two minutes at the start of class to tell a story about how the stuff you're learning in class today was actually used to do, well, anything useful or cool. See if your students don't pay a whole lot more attention for the entire day.

And this is a problem with a lot of college classes. Many professors have no idea how their course material is used in practice (career academics are especially vulnerable to this), or they know but they aren't telling. When I first took Linear Algebra, we learned everything except practical application, so I did the familiar cram-for-the-exam-then-forget-everything method of study. Then I took Computer Graphics, which was really cool, and I realized that maybe I should have paid more attention since we were using scaling, rotation and translation matrices on a regular basis. And then I took another neat course where we learned about the math behind sending a space shuttle into orbit, which required a whole lot of dealing with vectors and matrices. And then I worked in the industry as a game designer of all things, and found that you could use matrices to solve certain types of game balance problems. This would have been nice to know when I was taking the course!

It's like a lot of professors out there imagine themselves as Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid . Wax on, wax off. Do that a few thousand times. After you're done, then I'll tell you how to kick the other guy's face in. That makes for great storytelling, but lousy pedagogy.

So, I see this as a huge advantage for professors who have actual, honest-to-goodness industry experience: we can share that experience with our classes. Why am I spending perfectly good class time talking about something abstract and obscure like positive feedback loops? Glad you asked, let me tell you about a game I worked on that had game balance issues because of a feedback loop that was unintentionally embedded in the core mechanics, and here's what we did to fix it. I'm not teaching you this stuff because the IGDA Curriculum Framework says I should, I'm teaching you the stuff that I've actually used myself on the job. So pay attention. (And they do, most of the time.)

Now, there is a danger here: you have to have the context but also the content. There is a perception in academic circles that the only thing an industry person does is come into the classroom and tell a bunch of entertaining war stories. You've gotta deliver the goods, too, so your students actually have the knowledge and skills that they're supposed to apply. But in my own experience as a student and as a teacher, there's more danger of too little context than too much.

Reading over my notes from GDC, I just realized that I commonly hear two pieces of advice for teaching:

• Encourage students to fail early and often. Being in school is the one time where you can do this without losing millions of publisher dollars in the process. BUT,
• Punish students harshly for failure. It's a tough industry, and classes should reflect that.

These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, although it seems like it at first glance. The former is primarily concerned with taking creative risks: trying forms of gameplay that have never been done before. The latter mostly involves setting and achieving reasonable goals: controlling the scope of a project, keeping to a schedule and meeting deadlines.

However, the two viewpoints collide when you're teaching a studio class where the output is a complete game -- if the students try hard, but end up making a game that is just not fun or interesting (in spite of their efforts). As a teacher, do you grade them harshly, because a comparable professional project would mean that their studio would be out of business and they'd all be looking for new work? Or do you grade them generously for their ability to try hard, stick with a process and complete the project? Either way would seem to send the wrong message.

One common mistake I warn students about (especially art and audio students, and to a lesser extent game design students) is to never include substandard work in a portfolio just to show how much you've improved. Game companies don't care about how much you've improved, they care about how good you are now, and whether you can help them make a great game now. If you put mediocre work in your portfolio, the message you send is that this is the best you can do.

It occurred to me the other day that this might not be the case for teachers. I've never heard of an instructor putting together a portfolio of their own students' work to show how much their students have improved under their tutelage, but I don't see why something like that wouldn't be valuable if you're marketing yourself as a first-rate teacher.

Likewise, a university might consider this for its promotional materials, the same way that the beauty industry likes to show lots of before/after photos so you can see how much of a change their products can make. Again, I've never seen this before, but at the moment I'm having a hard time thinking why not.

So, I'm just heading home from GDX 2008. My talk was about what a nontechnical game designer can do to get a better understanding of programming; I'll post a link to the slides as soon as I figure out where to host them.

The conference itself was great; it was small (about 700 people, compared to the ~30,000 at GDC) which meant that you actually have the time to have real conversations with people, without having to leave to say a quick 'hi' to twenty more people. You have time to actually play games with other game developers. You get to meet the people for the first time who you've previously passed a dozen times in the hallways of GDC, like ships in the night.

Some quick thoughts that I wrote down from all of my various side discussions with people, in no particular order:

• There's a common pattern in teaching game design: many students start out wanting to make a copy of their favorite big-budget game; as students, they have this huge gift that is the academic freedom to innovate, and they just want to make Something of War-something. After they get in the industry and the novelty wears off, then they want the freedom to create and innovate that they no longer have. The professors from industry are already at the point where they value creative freedom and we're setting up our classes to provide what we wish we had when we were students, but we forget for a moment that we didn't appreciate what we had at the time. I'm not sure if there's a way to fix this, other than to treasure the few students who are exceptions and set them up as examples for everyone else.


• The term "independent" (or "indie") as applied to game development is vague, because it can mean any combination of three different things: business model (not owned by a publisher), money (low-budget, not AAA), or experimental gameplay (not just a derivative clone). It might be better to abolish the term "indie" from our vocabulary, and be more specific about what we're talking about.


• Women and minorities are still being horribly marginalized in the mainstream game industry (okay, no news there). But, most of the efforts to fix this so far have focused on attracting more of them to the industry. I'm thinking that an equally important piece of the puzzle is raising awareness within the existing industry that this is a major problem. In the past, I've suggested that every game designer should take Women's Studies as a class; I should add Minority Studies to the list. And I should specify that these would not be electives or suggestions, but required coursework for anyone seeking a game degree.


• Since the beginning of time, some games have been designed with technical constraints first. Today, it's something like "point-and-click is easy to implement in Flash, so what games can we make where the only player action is point-and-click?" A couple hundred years ago, it was "we have all these maps, what games can we play that use maps?" Three thousand years ago, it was "we have all this wood and rocks and pebbles, so what games can we play with wood and rocks and pebbles?"

I won't say that students never cheat, either at a two-year or four-year institution. It's one of those things that a teacher has to watch out for. (In my case, I try to make my assignments enjoyable enough that no one would want to cheat... and when that fails, at least making assignments where it would be impossible to get someone else to do your work for you, like giving an in-class presentation.)

However, the methods of cheating differ between community college and a more typical four-year university. Honestly, policing a class at community college is much easier.

At a four-year school, there are student dorms, and fraternities and sororities and student clubs, all places where students can save old assignments and tests to form a study bank (which forces professors to vary their test questions, or else have some students who suspiciously seem to know every answer as if it were memorized...). Most students have a social network of friends and they typically study together, which opens the door to having them do each other's assignments.


At a community college, ironically, there is no community; it's a day campus only. Students may have friends, but a lot of those friends aren't fellow students, so there's less group study. Most students don't stay around longer than two years, either, which limits the amount of old tests they can pass on to the next "generation" of students (since this generation is only one year behind them).

The net result is that it's easier to repeat test questions at a community college, without fear that my students are going to walk in with a study sheet cribbed from last year's exam. It's also easier to request that homework assignments be done on an individual basis, because a lot of students don't have the means to work in groups anyway.

Of course, the down side to this is that assignments that require work in a team outside of class are much harder. As with everything in life, there are tradeoffs.

Suppose you develop a new course, one that has never been taught before anywhere else. I'm not sure if any of the classes I've taught are entirely original, but a couple of them might be.

It occurs to me that my students get course credit for taking my classes, but I don't get course credit for teaching it! Some day it might be nice to, you know, have a Bachelor's degree in game design from all the courses I've taught. But it's never going to happen, because I don't actually get course credit for teaching my courses.

In some ways it shouldn't matter. In theory, if I'm qualified to teach a course, it may as well be on my transcript anyway. In other ways it most certainly matters; if I teach a class at the graduate level when I don't have a graduate degree (yes, this can happen), it would be nice to get some credit hours towards my own graduate degree!

I was talking with Brenda recently (we do that a lot) and she gave me something new to worry about.

Whenever a student of mine gets a job in the industry, it reflects on me, personally (because most of the time, I'm the only person from industry they've had direct contact with in a classroom). In other words, my students may affect my ability to get industry contract work at some point.

The assumption is that if I taught them everything they know, then their skills and abilities are a reflection of my own. This isn't entirely true, of course, but it doesn't matter. A lot of people believe it's true, therefore it influences their perception, and perception is everything when it comes to reputation. I say "my" here, but this really applies to any industry-based teacher, especially at a school where they're the only one of their kind.

Sometimes this works in my favor. Last year I had two absolutely brilliant students who made it into the industry, and they're making me look good, through no fault of my own.

Sometimes this works against me. Maybe some day I'll have an absolutely horrible student, who somehow blunders into an industry job and screws things up horribly. If I'm asked to provide a recommendation I can be reserved about it, but beyond that, I have no defense against this. But it's still a potential black mark on my record.

I suppose if one is really paranoid, the best defense is to work for a university that has overly selective admission requirements, and get oneself installed on the admissions board. For the rest of us... I suppose we just have to cross our fingers and hope that we get more good than bad (and that maybe we can be enough of an influence on enough of our students to make the difference).

Every field has its jargon. Game designers will happily talk about HUDs and avatars and positive feedback loops, oblivious to the fact that most people who haven't been doing this for the last few years of their career might have no idea what they're talking about. This is a particular danger when teaching, by the way, that you lapse into "designer-speak" without defining your terms, only to be met with blank stares.

People in academia do this too, and it can sometimes be confusing for the new designer-turned-teacher to keep up. A recent discussion on the IGDA game educators mailing list reminded me that one of the new terms an industry person is likely to run into is the terminal degree.

(Disclaimer: since I've only been doing this the last couple of years, I might get some details wrong. If you see any errors, feel free to post in the comments and I'll fix the post. Thank you.)

What is a terminal degree? The best description I can think of is a degree higher than Bachelor's, which is the highest degree offered, at the institution you received it, at the time you received it. Normally this means a Ph.D., but some fields don't offer one (the best-known are probably MFA and MBA) so those are referred to as terminal Master's degrees. Typically, a non-terminal Master's takes less time than a terminal Master's, which takes less time than a Ph.D. (in case you're trying to get an advanced degree as fast as possible).
Edit: Looks like I was wrong about this, it's just the highest degree offered in a field -- still, usually a Ph.D. but in some fields an MFA, or other degree. I'm not sure what happens at boundary conditions, such as if you get an MFA in Game Design (the highest degree offered today) and then one school decides to offer a Ph.D. in Game Design. Does that invalidate the 'terminality' of these other degrees?

Note that this means that if a new Ph.D. is offered at a university that previously only offered a Master's, whether the Master's is terminal or not is based on when the student enrolled; if you started before the Ph.D. was available, it's terminal. Timing matters.

Why should you care? Terminal degrees are important if you're planning to make a career of teaching. Having one means that you get paid more; at some places it's even a requirement for certain positions. If you don't have one already, think about getting one. Unfortunately, leaving a full-time career in industry to go back to graduate school is difficult for most people. Fortunately, once you do have a full-time job at a university, one of the more common benefits is being able to take classes for free or almost-free; if it's not practical to get your terminal degree first, it's quite possible to get it second.

From seeing a number of people going through graduate school, I also secretly suspect that it's called a "terminal degree" because it has a good chance of killing you.

One problem that a lot of universities have is that each department is walled off from the others, and communication across departments is hard. (As you might imagine, communicationg with other schools is even harder.)

I think I may have accidentally discovered a way around this.

In my case, I teach game design classes that are typically dropped in some kind of multimedia department along with all the artists and animators, and finding an actual programmer in the bunch is like finding the needle in the proverbial haystack.

This quarter, I taught a class to programmers in their own department. (I did this for entirely selfish reasons: as an adjunct, taking on another course meant more pay. The fact that it let me speak to a room full of programming students so I could pimp my game design courses for next quarter was a nice bonus.)

The funny thing is, through the process of teaching this class, I met a lot of other faculty in the department, and they now see me as one of their own. I suspect the see me as "the guy who teaches Systems Analysis... oh, and he also does something with video games" rather than the other way around, and when they have students interested in games they know where to send them. This is not something that could have been done at the departmental level; it happened one-on-one, with me being right there in the trenches with the other faculty in a department that isn't my "home". I think I've built some bridges that just weren't there before, and I may try it again in the future.

By this time next year, I'll have taught classes at three different schools. It remains to be seen whether I can forge connections between them, but I'd like to. (This is especially important since my "main" employer right now is a community college, and we want to send our students to four-year schools when they're done here!)

Incidentally, this has another implication: if you're a professional developer considering a full-time switch to academia, having multiple skills (programming and game design, for example) is a huge benefit. It may or may not get you hired, but once you're in it might give you a foot in the door to teach one class in "that other department" -- and from there, maybe you can pull in a steady supply of interdisciplinary action right under everyone's nose.

I had my interactive final today in my Game Industry class, this being the fourth time I've given it. Nearly everything went wrong -- I couldn't connect the SNES's RF adaptor to the overhead projector, my PS2 suddenly died mid-exam with the dreaded Disc Read Error, and I forgot my Wii-mote at home which killed the idea of using that console at all. And yet, it ended up being a great experience, probably the best of any of the four times I've run the thing. What's behind this mystery?

I think the reason for this is familiarity: the same way that you learn a game at deeper levels by playing it multiple times. When you first start playing a game, you're dealing with very broad strategies: I want to go for the longest road bonus, I want to build a Necropotence deck, I want to play a Wizard. Or in this case, I want a collaborative final exam that feels somewhere between a game demo at the old E3 and a live game show.

As you play more, you start to see subtler variations in strategy and the tactics that support it: I should make my initial placement on Wood and Clay squares, I should tweak my deck, I should take the Toughness feat to make the early levels more survivable. In the case of the final exam, I notice that certain questions are frequenly misunderstood (and can be modified or eliminated), some questions can be asked of several games (so if I accidentally skip a question, I may be able to come back to it later), and some game demos can be simulated by finding a video on YouTube.

And that's what happened today, for the first time. I've given this exam enough that I'm now used to it, and I can make adjustments on the fly. I knew from experience that I need a few hours to set up all the equipment, so I arrived early. I knew to test everything beforehand, so I had enough advance warning to find gameplay videos online. I didn't expect a console to suddenly die in mid-exam, but I was able to adapt by eliminating one question and rewriting a couple of others in real-time. Small tweaks here and there, much the same as tweaking a Magic deck, or an RPG character, or a strategy.

So, two of my former students got married today. This was not a surprise; I don't think I ever saw one of them without the other for as long as I'd known them. (You can tell they were my students, because the bride walked down the aisle to the theme of Aerith. And the two figures on the top of the wedding cake were Tidus and Yuna.)

It was a strange feeling, being part of that. I certainly never would have dreamed of inviting any of my professors to meet my family when I was an undergrad. (My wife, who tried to get to know some of her professors outside of class, was repeatedly told that it was somehow "wrong" or "inappropriate" or "unprofessional" for reasons that I've yet to understand.) Yet, the whole thing doesn't make me feel weird or freaky. It makes me feel pretty special, actually.

I think this kind of thing might be specific to game professors, and maybe a few other professions. I'm teaching people how to go after their dream jobs, and part of that is learning about what their dreams actually are. Students don't typically seek game jobs for the fame or prestige or high pay; goals and hopes and dreams are always on the surface, and these things are very personal. So, I suppose it's much easier to know students on a personal level if you're teaching in this field, as opposed to teaching calculus, or quantum physics, or signals and systems.

At the same time, there was another strange thing I didn't expect: I didn't actually know anyone in the room. I saw these two students outside of class a lot of the time, so I figured I'd spot at least a few of the people I saw them hang out with. Instead I was in a room with a hundred strangers, and it made me realize just how much I didn't know about them. And I realized I'd felt this way before when I was a student, when I'd see one of my professors in the bathroom or the grocery store or something, and it was like "whoa, they're an actual human being with a life outside of the lecture hall?" And now I see the same thing in reverse -- whoa, my students have actual lives outside of my classes that I don't actually know about! (I used to think this was because there were all these formal barriers between students and professors that the professors put in the way intentionally; now I think it's just a by-product of seeing a person on a regular basis for only a few hours a week, so that you "know" them but only in a narrow context.)

So, for those of you in the industry who are considering teaching, this is the kind of stuff that I hope you have to look forward to. And yes, since I know you'll ask, the cake was delicious and moist.

Good luck, you crazy kids.

To add to my notes from last year, here are some random bits of conversations I had this year that students may find interesting:

• Game projects that actually solve a social problem rather than merely being fun will get you more press, because most student game projects don't have any practical value to the player. If you provide some, you will stand out. Note that in the case of a game that raises awareness of an issue, the call to action can be the reward for beating the game!


• Evaluate lots of game authoring tools, from Game Maker to DarkBasic to Torque. Reviews listing the strengths and limitations of each would make for an excellent post on your blog if you have one, and could be of great help to professors who might be considering some or all of them but who have no time to evaluate them. This will also give you great practice at getting up to speed with a new tool, something you will probably have to do from time to time in the industry.


• If you go to GDC, don't drink. I know there are tons of great parties with open bars, but just don't do it. Think: how much did you pay to go to GDC? Probably 1000ドル or more. How many free drinks would you need in order to make the cost worthwhile? Too many. So, use your time at parties productively: network, meet people, find out who's hiring. Once you have a full-time job, you can buy your own drinks.


• Tip from Brenda: a great way to get promoted at a game company is to find a stressed-out lead and ask what you can do to help. This is also a great way to get noticed as a student if you find a stressed-out professor who used to work in industry.

I also found some interesting advice specific to student game projects, courtesy of the games that won this year's IGF Student Showcase:

• For student projects, keeping the scope small and focused should be your number one priority. Nearly all of the student IGF winners this year only showcase a single game mechanic; then they build the entire game to support it. If your proposed game is large enough that it requires the inclusion of mini-games, it is too big for you to finish. If your proposed student project is a mini-game, you're probably on the right track.


• You can make a better student project if you learn and use good tools. This year's IGF students used a wide variety of tools: Anim8or, Photoshop, Cubase LE, XNA, Adventure Game Studio, Aftereffects, Source, Visual Studio, 3DSMax, SVN, MS Project, Excel, Panda 3D, Python... you name it. These can save huge amounts of time. Learn at least a few of them early on in your college career, so you'll have the time to use them on projects during your final year.


• Rapid prototyping with iteration is your best friend. If you can't have your student game project up and running in some form in a week or two, it's too big. Use a steady stream of testers who have never played your game before, and keep modifying to make the new-player experience as solid as possible.


• If at all possible, work on team projects rather than working alone. The game industry really cares about whether you can fit in to a team, and if you can only create projects on your own it will be much more difficult for you to get hired... no matter how brilliant your projects are.


• Enter your project in lots of competitions. Many students reported that the pressure of competition forced them to keep their scope small and their quality high while still making regular progress.


• When coming up with a name for your game, make it something pronouncable. It just annoys people when they have to say "Narbacular" or "Poesysteme" or "Synaestheste"...


• Make your game extensible. If your game ends up being really great, you may want to continue working on it after graduation to make it into a full, commercial game.


• If working on a project for a class, do as much preproduction work as possible before the semester begins. If your team enters the class already knowing what the concept is, you'll have that much more time for iteration.


• Some game concepts are not particularly challenging for programmers or artists. If you are working on one of those teams, you may be tempted to make things more complicated just so you can show off your skills. Don't do this. Do what's best for the game, not what's best for the developers.


• The best Producer for a student project is someone who's really good at details. When the game has a thousand small tasks (and reasons why half of them need to be there), it's great to have someone on your team who can keep track of all this stuff, and it's even better if that person is the producer.


• The best game designers for student projects aren't the ones with the best game design skills, but the best people skills. Game designers are going to be telling everyone else on the team what to do, and being able to order your peers around in a way that encourages buy-in and good feedback and communication is absolutely critical if you want stuff to get done. If your "best designer" is a programmer, he or she can still contribute to the design (and will happily do so).


• If you finish your student project and it's something you're happy with, consider incorporating as an LLC. It's cheap, it's easy, and it means you all now have a shipped title at a professional game studio.

Most students start in the same place: "I love playing games and I think making them would be really cool, but I don't know anything about the industry and I don't know where to begin if I wanted to do it myself." (Let's call this Experience Level 0.)

Students level up the first time when they learn the reason why they didn't know where to start: games are made by teams of specialists these days, and knowing programming and art and design and production and audio is just too much for a single person unless the scope of the game is really small. This is around the time they realize there is a community of game developers, and that there are resources like Gamasutra and GDC. At this level, they can try to make their own game, or team up with a few other students on a small project.

The second time students level up is when they actually attend their first GDC. There is a shift in thinking, from "game developers are these legendary people who make these amazing games and I could never hope to be a part of that" to "wow, these developers are real people, just like me." And then the students are suddenly able to talk to professional developers without making fools of themselves. (I do my best to prepare my students for this before it happens, to varying degrees of success.)

The final level-up happens when students have been through a complete development cycle on a game (either at a professional studio as an intern, or on their own student project). At this point they can talk with professional developers at an equal level, contributing to conversations with their own experiences. And then they are truly ready for industry.

As you might expect, one of the joys of teaching is seeing this progression (which, naturally, sometimes doesn't happen at all... and sometimes happens out of order).

I suppose it had to happen eventually, and the miracle is that I've been teaching for a year and a half before this happened to me. I'd be horrified if this had happened, say, a couple weeks after I'd originally started.

I'm talking about forgetting my class notes, not realizing it until five minutes before class starts, and having to run a two-hour lecture entirely from memory.

I'm one of those people who likes to plan stuff in advance. I'm more comfortable when speaking to a crowd if I've already written down and rehearsed what I'm about to say. I'm much more comfortable if I have my notes in front of me, in case I get lost (which I often do). From talking with other teachers, this is something of a rite of passage. (Some day, perhaps, I'll take this to the next level: showing up for class without having prepared a lecture in advance at all, and just saying whatever occurs to me at the time. But that day will not come any time soon if I can help it -- I was never all that great at improv.)

I realize that not all teachers are like this. Some don't do any planning in advance at any rate, so this is the norm. Others rehearse things so many times that they've got it memorized, so they don't need any notes. I'm somewhere between the extremes, and for me it was really scary.

The thing is, I survived. And I'm not even sure my students noticed. I suppose it helps that I've taught this particular class three times already, so I had a pretty good idea of the general topics. After I got home, I reviewed my notes and found that I covered most of the major points, and I mentioned the rest in the following class as an aside. So, no harm done.

But I'm not going to try it again any time soon, all the same.

This year at GDC, I hosted a roundtable entitled Breaking In to Academia. Brenda has been kind enough to post notes of the session, for anyone in the industry who might be curious what it's like to teach (or anyone in academia who would like some additional insight on the mindset of those in industry who would like to teach).

Getting proper credit in a game matters. As a professional developer, a large part of your ability to get hired is the list of projects you've previously worked on; if you aren't in the credits, it becomes much harder for future employers to verify.

Many professional developers don't realize how important it is (until they get burned by it). This makes it rather important to at least mention it briefly to game development students, so that they're aware before getting burned.

As of just recently, the IGDA Credit Standards Committee released a beta version of a standards document. Several very large teams are putting this through its paces on real projects, to see where the problems are. (The document itself can be found at the link above.)

For those of you teaching a class in game development, especially one such as a "capstone" that involves students working on teams to make working games, consider making your students comply with the credit standards. If you have a student working in the role of Producer (or else Project Lead), you can make that an assignment for the student to ensure proper crediting of everyone on the team.

If you do so, be sure to let the Credit Standards Committee know how it goes. I don't think they've got anyone testing out the standards on a small-team project yet, and it'd be nice to know if the standards scale down properly.

Brenda writes an interesting piece for The Escapist on how game design is frighteningly similar to game play. A quote from me appears in the sidebar on page 2. I assume this doesn't count as an academic publication, but thankfully I'm not in a "publish or perish" environment.

One thing that came across loud and clear to me at GDC is that there are many developers who would like to teach, but they don't know where to begin... and there are many schools who would like to hire people with industry experience to teach their classes, but every time they try to recruit they don't get any applicants. This is strange. What's going on here?

The solution to this mystery lies in the obstacles that prevent developers from applying. Here are some examples:

• Accreditation boards require that all professors must have a terminal degree.
• All applications must go through Human Resources. HR writes the job description and also screens applicants, even though they don't know the first thing about game development.
• The school is located in a place where there are no professional game developers anywhere nearby.

There are plenty of schools that have found ways to remove these obstacles, and they are the ones who have no problems filling faculty positions. There are other schools that throw up their hands, assuming that these are just forces of nature that can't be worked around, and then they complain that they can't find anyone qualified to teach their classes. If you are at a school where you just can't seem to attract experienced people to teach there, I'm here to tell you that these problems are not insurmoutable if you are sufficiently dedicated. Here are some examples:

Accreditation:

• Talk to your accreditation board to see if any exceptions can be made. Game development (especially game design) is a field where terminal degrees don't exist, so finding someone who is both educated and knows what they're talking about is effectively impossible. See if it's possible to substitute experience for formal education in specific cases.
• Some accreditation requirements don't force all faculty to hold terminal degrees, just a certain percentage. Hire industry people into departments that are already above the threshold.
• Accreditation requirements may not apply to certain kinds of positions, like adjuncts or visiting faculty. (I ran into one developer who has happily been a full-time "visiting" professor for the last four years.)
• Some schools allow provisional hires, where they bring in someone with industry experience to teach now, and it is expected that the person will work on their own time to earn an advanced degree within a certain amount of time. Plenty of industry people are more than willing to do this, we just aren't willing to leave the industry to become a full-time grad student first.
• I ran into one school that offers online classes, claiming it must meet accreditation requirements in all fifty states. I wondered, if there are only a few states with super-strict requirements, why not hire an industry prof and only offer their classes in (say) 47 states?

Human Resources:

• I remember a certain job posting where a school was trying to hire an art/animation faculty under the job title of game design. I talked with some people at that school at GDC, who expressed equal frustration at the whole thing. Apparently they had not been consulted to write the job description, and of course anyone from industry contacting the school to inquire about the position would be talking to HR and not them. This is a communication breakdown that could be fixed in a few ways...
• Open a dialogue with HR to make sure the job postings say what you want them to say.
• Put contact information in the job posting for someone who actually knows what they're talking about, in case anyone from industry seeks additional information. HR is not capable of answering technical questions about game development, and they will probably not forward these things on in a timely manner, so prevent them from getting these questions in the first place.
• Don't just post a job opening on your school's website and think you're done, because the number of game developers that regularly search there is pretty much zero. Make postings on places game developers are likely to read, such as Gamasutra and Game_Edu. Attend GDC and go to events and sessions where you're likely to find interested candidates. Spread the word, because it isn't going to spread itself.

Schools located somewhere other than California:

• First, are you absolutely sure there's no game developers in your area? I had always assumed I was the only professional game developer in the entire state of Ohio, until I received email from a casual game studio just a few miles from where I live. And then another email from a publisher about as far away. And then I met someone from EA at a local IGDA meeting. And then I encountered a local game audio professional on the plane back from GDC, who then told me about another game studio that I've yet to meet. Columbus may not have the developer population of San Francisco, but it's certainly not vacant. Of course, it took a bit of digging (and a bit of luck) for me to find this out. Maybe you're in the same situation and you just don't know it.
• Does your school offer online courses? If a professor can teach from their living room, you can open your search to the entire world; it doesn't matter where your physical campus is, if all your game courses are online.
• Do you have teleconferencing? I met a few industry professionals who would be happy to give a guest lecture to my class, as long as they don't have to travel.
• Develop and maintain ties to the industry. Conferences like GDC are ideal for this. I even met one school that hired a full-time employee whose entire job is to research and contact game development companies. How do these ties help you? For one thing, it makes it much easier to have guest speakers from industry; even if no one lives in (say) Nebraska, maybe a few people have family there, and they'd be happy to drop by for an hour the next time they're visiting. Maybe someone at that company knows someone else who happens to live in your area, and a couple of phone calls to a friend of a friend gets your position filled (it's a small industry). And even if you don't have any faculty with industry experience, you can at least run your course content and curriculum through an industry advisory board, and get additional feedback from any of your students who happen to land summer internships.

In short: stop whining and start recruiting!

It seems I met about a billion people this year at GDC, and I'm sure at least a few of you have found this blog by following the URL on my business card (if only out of morbid curiosity).

Some of the more popular areas of this blog (based on emails I've received):

• My proposed game design curriculum
• Reviews for textbooks on game design
• A series of articles on the differences between industry and academia (I'll retrofit with a "Culture Shock" tag at some later point)
• A two-part description of an interactive final exam
• A list of analogies to explain the field of game design
• A two-part article on what all teachers should know about game design

Or, just start from the beginning and read forward, and I apologize in advance if doing so makes your productivity drop for a few days.