Do you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?
It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.
"The professor made the class unfun."
"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"
I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.
And to be honest, I think games are a good stepping stone towards a career in software engineering / computer science. Especially back in the day when getting a game to run required you to mess around with the computer haha
You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all, and went back into academia where you have been ever since. You say you made a game as part of your PhD, but it's actually a speech therapy program you describe as research. There's nothing wrong with that project for what it is, but your students aren't criticizing you because you're a woman, they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.
I wouldn't bother pointing this contradiction out normally, but it's just so socially destructive to ask students for feedback and then attack them with the nastiest accusation you have access to, just because they requested a more experienced teacher. Poor kids! It's this kind of thing that results in recommendations to just avoid university entirely. Why sign up for being abused by a teacher like that?
That is not my entire games experience. I have 15 years total, spanning Game Master, lead gameplay engineer, game engineering director, and CTO. I was asked my route to academia, not my entire Gaming Industry CV.
> they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.
Nearly all of them have played games I've worked on, and can even find my name in the credits.
> Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up
You're going to make a bunch of assumptions based on a summary of my academic career and then try to insist that misogyny doesn't exist in tech?
Look - you say you have made games, and that your students have all played games where they could find your name in the credits. You also get feedback that your students don't believe you. This is a weird problem to have and should be trivial to fix if true. Just... boot up the games and show them where you're credited as the lead gameplay engineer? What do they say when you do that?
(And in indie it's way worse, it's more like 1% making it one year)
If you wanna do low-level code, you can go into embedded, sponsored OSI-companies, Microsoft, etc and get paid the same to more than gamedev with 10% of the stress and no crunch. If you wanna get paid much more and do more "vibe"/fun coding, you can go into app/web dev. If you want stability, you go into fintech/medtech/onsite/etc.
Gamedev offers the worst of all worlds and then constantly posits "why is there so much turn over?"...because you made the industry suck to work in.
What do you mean they "made" the industry suck to work in?