Sunday, 11 May 2014

Life Changing or Career Building?



“Is there a choice between teaching specific technical skills or developing learning attributes and “soft skills”? “

I don’t quite understand why you would want a choice, technical skills will give you the essential skills that you will definitely need in your job, while with soft skills you can easily pick them up as you go, they support your technical and hard skills, so I don’t see why people would want to learn soft skills specifically in the games industry, in my opinion they are useful but can only get you so far.

Of course you can’t just get there with technical skills and no soft skills, it wouldn’t work as you would probably be a robot or at least sound like one but they are developed automatically without any need to actually study them in my opinion


It's often said that hard skills will get you an interview but you need soft skills to get (and keep) the job.” Exactly my thoughts.

'Why spend three years teaching folk what we already know?'
Warren Spector, GDC 2006

I think this a very ignorant statement, why spend 3 years teaching folk? Because they need to learn for 3 years to actually get to the stage of knowledge that the professionals are at, then they have the knowledge to start being creative and create things that people haven’t discovered yet, the more fresh minds there are the better. Sure they can do all the research online and find out themselves through hours of searching for answers online for free, but it would take away a lot of life experience, these soft skills that are developed through social interaction, and even if they do have enough soft skills they wouldn’t really have any of the industry connections or anyone to turn to for help.

 I know that can be argued by the fact that if they do enough research and talk to people in the industry on forums or ask online they can still obtain the same level of knowledge as someone who goes to university, and it helps in the games industry that you don’t even need a degree, all you need is a great portfolio but the person doing the research would still be asking for help and want some kind of tutorial from industry experts to get to a professional level, therefore it is important to “teach folk about what we already know.”

We can’t know in advance what skills we will need in future that’s impossible, but we can prepare for the future by increasing our knowledge of what we already know and then when the time comes to create/solve new problems we will have a large database of knowledge and experience at our disposal. So I think it’s important that we keep meeting the current demand for specific technical skills so that we can use those skills to be creative and create new ideas and solutions to existing problems or future problems.

Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers.
Some claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background.
They can’t both be right can they? How can education meet these opposing views and yet provide a valid and fulfilling experience to students?”

This is a really tough question to answer, because they ARE both right in my opinion, in the games industry all you really need, especially as an artist, is a great portfolio regardless of having a degree or not, you just have to showcase your ability, it may be different for programmers but there must be a way for them to showcase their abilities at the interview tests or through a code they programmed for a game mod.

University education isn’t meant to literally pamper their students like they do with high school or sixth form college education, most of the research and work has to be done by the student alone, they are just pushed in the right direction and kept on track.

In my opinion it isn’t really up to the educator to get a job for the student, it’s the student’s job to become good enough while in education to grab the attention of the employer. The university experience is more like life experience and soft skill experience in my opinion. You still have to do a lot of the research and study online, like someone not in education would. It’s your own responsibility, not Education or University.

Maybe the universities just have to increase their standards and workloads/ expectations for these students. Think about it, if the average is really high, there is a great chance of all of these students getting jobs. It’s a bit like Feng Zhu’s school almost all of their graduates have jobs at the end since they are so dedicated and brutally trained.

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