Oh this commercial has made my day so bright and shinny. There are so many layers of fun that you can just peel off and make fun of it. glorious!
One of the big things they teach is how to have people work well with other people. Comp Sci and Arts pretty much have you work alone. The dynamic totally changes when you have to work with other people on the same thing and knowing how to work with a situation where someone else’s work has a huge impact on how your stuff works. So it’s all about learning production.
Also, tack on that there are certain maths, like vector and matrix math, and 3D data structures you should learn about. Then there are shaders which can introduce some low level programming.
There are also film aspects to it, understanding interactions and story, some principles of animation.
While you get a good basis for these things in traditional art or comp sci classes, there are things that lend itself toward the aspects of Game Design. EA has to retrain people right now after they come in from school, but now they are partnered in a post-undergrad program that teaches Game Design. You can now watch the bar to get into the gaming industry raise higher.
Good golly you’re right! It wasn’t so much the quality that bothered me, but the fact they made it seem like the ‘employees’ were only doing it because they didn’t really have to do anything productive.
My TAFE began their own Diploma of Multimedia Games course last year (which I did not attend) and that commercial reflects the students in the class so well. They all failed their Diploma.
Wow! Has iit really gotten that bad? I remeber the ‘class’ I took just to be sure I pass the A+; what a waste. Took the darn test in 45min and nearly aced it. Didn’t 'cause I fell asleep.
But, first night in the class 2 computers burned. Really, smoke et al. Ok, first night they’ll learn, right? NOT! Last night of the class 3 burned. Ha, I ended it there took the cert and walked away with all the computers in the class. The rest went on the get their MSCE. I wouldn’t hire a cert to save my life.
Only have about two dozen of the old boxes left. Anybody want one?
I saw that commercial the other night along with the monthly Sanford-Brown College thingy in the mail that offers game desgin courses.
I laughed when I saw the ship flying backwards. The ship was from Privateer 2 and it was flying the wrong way.
I work for a small 3D Animation Studio and we’ve done some game art design work for other small indie developers before. We hire people with traditional 4 year degrees in Art or Video production. Some colleges and universities do offer 3d Animation courses and programs, but basically they just have to know the basics of Lightwave and understand lighting/color aspects.
Now we have hired a couple people from industry programs, but from the DAVE school at Universial Studios.
The game studios themselves were made up of traditional programmer geek types that knew C++ and maybe a little about game dynamics, but mainly they learned on their own about game develop, AI programming etc.
I only attempt 3D work as a hobby. I actually work on the business/contract end of things and keep the renderfarm working. Hell my degrees are in German and International Business, but I tought myself some C programming, Python, PERL, PHP/MySQL, and enough Unix system aministration to get all Linux boxes talking to each other to run the Lightwave Rendering Engine.
Unfortunately, the type of games I liked to play (space combat and flight combat sims) aren’t made anymore. If I actually had skills, I might actually create my own and maybe someday it will be plug and play enough with OSS tools to do so. But until then…