Majoring in video games
latimes.com
latimes.com
If you want to be an artist, do yourself a favor and go to an actual, reputable art school. You will gain the foundation you need to be a proper artist, not just some monkey hacking out metal-suited space marines all day.
I've known many people in the industry, and the verdict is unanimous: game degrees aren't worth crap, and generally the people coming out of them aren't as capable.
The one we have in Denmark[1] make the students work in a (small) real-life scenario, and actually produce games. On the side it is required to take courses in AI, graphics, HCI, distributed networks and other fields relevant for game development.
"I’ve found that the best game designers have a well rounded education that includes the necessary Math, Science, & Computer Science courses, but also focuses on history, literature, science and other core subjects that take their imaginations to many different places. The games I’ve made have been based on topics that have interested me since I was a kid – history, airplanes, pirates, railroads etc. – topics I studied in school, read about in books, saw in movies, and learned about through boardgames and card games. It is definitely important to have strong technical skills to be a designer, but you also have to have cool ideas for games – and those ideas will come from places outside of computer science. One of our young designers graduated from Stanford with a degree in History and Computer Science which was key to his success in designing Civ IV. Other designers have studied a variety of things and honed their programming/designing skills by creating prototypes of games as a hobby, or being a part of beta testing groups. The most important thing is that your son has a passion for playing games – and plays them often (after he finishes his homework of course!)." (from http://www.firaxis.com/community/asksid.php)
Anyone who likes computer games would be well served by playing Pirates! (and reading the manual that came with it, which is in itself a bit of a history lesson).
The game developers still want people who have made good mods or have done good art on freeware or something along those lines. That shows an ability to do the work - the same as how you can get hired based on your work on OSS.
Sure, if you come out of Stanford or UIUC or whatever, you'll be able to interview with Google, but if you didn't, you better have done some good OSS work, or no dice.
Eventually, I'll write a blog post on the parallels on the corporate blog.
My husband is a programmer in the games industry. He emigrated from the UK as a child, along with his father and uncle. (Who both worked as programmers in the UK) Since he still has British citizenship, we've considered spending a few years in the UK. What's stopped us (so far) is that it seems like programer salaries in Britain are extremely low compared to the cost of living there. Things like housing, food, and transport are 50-100% more expensive in the UK, but the salaries appear to be roughly the same as here in Canada. Worse, it seems like most of the software companies are clustered in the very expensive areas.
I think a lot of smart people, especially CompSci grads ended up working in the finance sector which pays (paid?) way more than classic software development, which pays more than game dev, so that probably explains the shortage.
With that kind of cost of living it really surprises me that there are a lot of startups in London compared to other parts of Europe.
The first graduates just finished their second joint production (and thereby their thesis) this summer. It'll be interesting to see whether or not the graduates will make it in the industry.
That seems to imply that the fun of CS comes from it being about a fun topic. That's a very disturbing sentiment to me, one all too common.