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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Video game colleges are a sham, and anybody who's serious about entering the industry would be wise to avoid them. If you want to program games, get a traditional CS degree, focus heavily on graphics and AI, and do a lot of your own dev work in your spar time.

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.

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Well, the article is talking about a USC grad program, not really comparable to one of those video game only niche 'colleges.' The way I see it, it's not unlike other interdisciplinary sort of grad programs (e.g. robotics). In the end though, you're right in saying that a traditional degree in CS, with the raw skills in specialties needed in games like graphics and AI, is all you really need. FYI I am a game graphics programmer, with no game degree, just a CS undergrad degree from a public university who took a lot of masters level graphics classes in school and read a lot of SIGGRAPH papers.

See what Sid Meier says:

"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).

Yes, pure game colleges might be utter crap, but I think the "game-lines" you can choose at regular CS-universities is a good idea.

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.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=342642

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