Skills Council chair says incoming report will be substantial; calls for dev participation
The coalition Government’s Skills Review will draw a “blueprint to transform the UK into the best source of talent for videogames production”, says Eidos life president Ian Livingstone.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Livingstone expected the Skills Review to be published early 2011.
He, the chair of the Computer Games Skills Council, echoed calls for a rethink in UK game development academia.
"Clearly the videogames industry needs graduates to come out of universities and colleges with the hard skills necessary to make games rather than just the philosophical knowledge about them," he said.
Livingstone has been collaborating with Revolution Software’s Charles Cecil, Double Negative’s Alex Hope, Skillset and NESTA for the review.
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He said the report would be “substantial”, with recommendations of each aspect of the talent pipeline; “from junior school all the way though to higher and further education”.
As part of the review, two employer surveys are making the rounds across the industry, and Livingstone urges British devs to get involved.
“The Review is a one-off chance to actually effect some real change that will benefit the industry.”
The oft-cited ‘crisis’ of UK game academia is cited by many as an issue of urgency.
Recent research performed by open learning provider Train2Game highlighted a lack of relevant skills among recruits to the game development industry.
Meanwhile, Hollie Heraghty of Aardvark Swift sparked a vehement debate on Develop Online by saying that graduates are rarely given appropriate skills after graduating.
Frontier’s David Braben went a step further, recently saying that “since 2001 we have seen educational standards decline”.
Meanwhile, Northwest Vision and Media’s Enda Carey hit a nerve late last year in saying that the games industry needs to help education rather than “sit around bitching about them”.
The GamesIndustry.biz report features further information from Livingstone, along with reaction from UKIE director Michael Rawlinson.
The main problems are resourcing and program, particularly sourcing the experienced and knowledgeable to manage, direct and teach on a regular basis, and to develop and deliver a program that is current with todays evolving development environment.
I recently established Game School - Academy of Games to address this very problem and I personally tutor and mentor post grad students and developers on the skills gap and their career development across 36 individual modules.
I welcome anyone who is interested in growing the program to get involved and get in touch.
- Paul Varney, GameSchool (.co.uk)
I commented on Hollie's article so I won't repeat it all here, but I would like to amke one important point - while Universities could do better, a graduate is not a finished product. No other academic discipline would expect this; an accountant must continue to train after graduation, so must a doctor, an engineer or any knowledge intensive vocation. I think devs have to at least consider getting more serious about post graduate professional, development as well as helping steer the courses.
The big problem is prejudice and lazily assuming that people will jump through hoops for the privilege of working at the coal mine end of game development: long hours, tedium, low respect. Unrealistic expectations of what graduates should be able to do, with the attitude that degrees are just free vocational training, produces the illusion of a skills gap.
Developers have to do three things in my academic opinion:
1) not see it as their job to act as the worst kind of publishers coming into developers' offices to take over. Mostly that makes bad games, or at best cookie cutter clones, but this is exactly the same as making demands about what and how to teach. We are the professional educators. Students are NOT product.
2) trusting us to have the space to develop our own IP as it might produce something new and excellent. This isn't just about graduate recruits, it's about systemic analysis of game play, development and production, socially, cognitively as well as technically!
3) choose to work with select universities, ok, but widen access and disseminate skills in both directions. Skillset, etc, place great store on "industry links" that are bloody hard to build, but have no metric or mechanism to recognise academia's research output!
What I'd really like is some developer to take a risk, math the salary of a game academic for a year and get them to come into the workplace to analyse, synthesise and contribute to game development. That way, I think we'd soon see the value of game lecturers and recognise there is a lot academia could offer. This is the rough diamond, the hidden extra that Richard Wilson (CEO of TIGA) has been saying is the unique element of the UK industry.
The article cites 2001 as the date HE started to deteriorate. At least it's not the previous 1997, when "new" universities appeared, but this seems arbitrary. HE has been forced by selective, diminishing funding into making hard decisions. Blair's 50% target emphasised the mass market "shift quantity" approach, which most universities reluctantly followed. The ConDem alliance government are now punishing them for contrition with further funding cuts, recruitment caps and criticising them for not producing quality product. It's like being run over twice, while being expected to apologise for getting the car tyres dirty!
