Dear Teacher, a Video Game Developer Is a Real Job and Should Be Celebrated

I put together a video game programming club for the junior high school my nephew was in. The response was phenomenal. The teachers loved it, the principal talked about it every time he got a chance and the club was featured in several local news outlets as an example of the excellence and modernity of the local school system.

The language was C# using the (sadly now defunct) XNA game development framework, and it wasn't long before I had 7th and 8th graders making games/winform/console apps of all sorts. We made a 2D side-scrolling space shooter and a tower defence game and the parents are still begging me to put it on again, which I sadly cannot due to a moving out of the area.

One thing I will say, and I spoke of this to all the kids, is the game development can be a very harsh environment. Often with substandard pay, long hours and tons of stress. Which I found out first hand as I went into the game dev industry right out of college and quickly decided it was not a fit for me (being that I enjoy having a life outside of my career). But game development as a hobby is an excellent way to build up programming chops, have a ton of fun, and even work your way into the game industry if you find it fits your life/career goals.

In regards to the article, the teacher seems likely to be acting under the mistaken assumption that anything that involves computer games was "bad, mmmkay". I feel it is a safe statement to make the video games can have a positive affect on youth as I go interested in computers in general and programming specifically when I got into the Diablo 1 hacking/trainer scene so many years back. I was light years ahead of the read of my peers entering freshmen CS already familiar with visual studio, C++, memory debugging, binary dis-assembly and the many other tools of the game hacking trade.