Develop

What absolute rubbish.
You have a senior manager from one of the world's largest electronics and entertainment companies complaining that they can not compete because they are unable get suitable graduates. Has Sony never heard of training?
By all accounts the games industry should be described as a niche industry, the UK IT industry has around 1.1M employees compared with the UK games industry's 10,000. This is why universities teach java and web development rather than C++ and DirectX. They have a market of c23k entry level IT jobs per annum compared with the games industry's 'need' of 1700 staff over 5 years, it's simple business, you tailor and deliver courses to the biggest market opportunities.
If the games industry is truely committed to creating and maintaining suitable staff to create the games it needs to, then surely some of the £4BN p/a revenue could be used by the industry to create training and development schemes that would meet the specific needs of the industry.
Also, the games industry would do well to think about what steps can be undertaken to reduce the chronic levels of staff turnover and retirement within the industry. The IGDA QoL report estimated that the vast majority of developers would level the games industry within 10 years of joining. what hope is there for an industry if its workforce are to have such short careers? The net result would be that the industry would increasingly be looking for new recruits with mature skillsets, which are unlikely to exist - exactly the suitation that we are in now.
These industry spokespeople need to get in touch with reality, the 'problems' with the industry are not down the governments in other countries making impossible to compete with nor are they down to a lack of suitably educated raw recruits.
The root cause of the current problems in the UK games industry are squarely down to the lack of quality management within UK games companies, rather than trying to address the current issues through the development of internal or industry training programmes or even developing better approaches to development, the industry's finest are all out with the begging bowl and blaming everyone they can point a finger at.
It is interesting to note that two of the exec sound off have recently had 15 games cancelled between their companies.
Come on industry, and industry execs in particular, use all that creativity that goes into games to generate some truely innovative solutions to the current problems that you're facing as your current attempts do you no favours.

I see a lot of the discussions about Games Up tend to resort to criticising the management qualities of the spokespersons in question. But I was under the impression that it was studios like Sony and Frontier that had high staff retention.

Also elsewhere on this site you'll find a story from Chris Satchell in which he points out that degree applications go up when computer science or maths offer a games minor.

I think the point of this campaign isn't to ask for this to happen more - it's that when it does happen, it is done correctly.

Also: "It is interesting to note that two of the exec sound off have recently had 15 games cancelled between their companies."

Who's this - Sony, and...?

Actually Jamba, Gareth makes some very good points. I particularly agree with his assertion that the industry has created a lot it's own problems in this area. The combination of long hours, low pay, failed projects leads to high turnover and poor retention, rediculously high expectations from new hires and poor ongoing training are also factors. The industry as a workforce is small overall and has the potential to satisfy it's needs. Tax breaks are a double edged sword. I agree with a multi-vector solution to these problems but at the moment most of the companies are just squawking to the government and media and have made little effort to clean house themselves.

Gareth has hit a couple of the nails squarely on the head I feel in response to the initial statement.

This is a personal outlook, and I appreiciate that as such it can't paint a 100% factual picture of the games degree graduate situation, but I have just finished a 4 year Sandwich degree in Games Art at Teesside University.

I came in via the UCAS system (rather than freelance, with a self taught portfolio), with A-levels in Maths, Physics, Fine Art, and English Literature. (2 of which are stated, albeit at a degree level, as missing skills on the whole).

I had no prior experience in 3D, and only basic skills in Photoshop, (for fitting stuff to stick into my A-level sketchbooks). In under 2 years, I had reached a level, due to the facilities and teaching available at Teesside, that I got a 1 year work placement at Bizarre Creations working on PGR4, and just prior to that, had a piece work published at the Japanese Embassy representing Teesside, as part of a North-East Games mission to Japan.

In coming back to my Final year, I found that the university had massively improved its already excellent facilities and support, in order to stay ahead of the standard.

I taught myself Motion Capture, and choosing to specialise in character animation, created a project that has been suggested I try and put forward for the Gamasutra Student Soapbox. My overall portfolio is solid, and my tutors are proud of work, which is industry standard according to people I hav worked in the industry with.

Aside from the placement (which are relitavely few and far between), I don't represent a minority of games students with these achievements, especially at Teesside.
Now I understand that Teesside University has people sitting on the government panels, which means that the courses are well monitored, and probably fall into the 5% supposedly up to standard; but from personal, recent, first hand experience I have seen excellent work, and met dedicated students from a growing number of University institutions that have CG and games based degrees, such as Bristol, Abertay and Bournemouth; and furthermore, that the basic skills of Maths and Physics are far from lacking.

The only major issue I have repeatedly encountered when it comes to Games degree undergraduates, is a lack of knowledge concerning the process of learning in a 'University' institution, and how it differs from school, college, or a dedicated training facility.

This of course being, that you teach yourself most of it.

Not enough students across the board, from Law, Biology etc, right through to practical niche courses, like Games Art understand that you READ a subject at university, you are not led by the hand.

With courses like games design/art etc, I have seen too many people coming in, expecting to be sat down, and trained specifically on the given software for 3 years, like one of these online workshops you can pay for on CG Society etc.
These same people rapidly become jaded when they find out that although they get some training (as such specialised software requires a basic grounding), they have to, (and should), do about 4x as much in their own time, sitting in the university labs and studio's, and learning off of their peers.

The knock on effect being that there is a number of students off of these courses, who barely pass, or drop out, and also don't have a great deal good to say about the course simply because they weren't spoon fed everything they needed, despite having access to some outstanding facilities and media to use as they choose.

Consequently the UK games industry, with it's small number of employed dev's, gets a skewed view of the state of the courses, and the quality of the students, and blames the institutions, with articles such as these.

The only thing I find that could be levelled at the institutions is that they should make the difference between a 'degree', and a 'training course' more obvious, but frankly, that isn't their responsibility.

Looking at the figures 95% is a gross overstatement, in terms of lack of quality, of either the university courses, or the quality of the graduates. There are plenty of us who through our own hard work, and good support from our Universities, have strong portfolio's with which to enter the industry.
I personally have no other contributor to my work but the 4 years of my degree, and what I learned from tutors, peers, and my own hard work, and I had a AAA title under my belt as an undergraduate.

The best analogy I have found is that the games degree courses are like a free-roaming cross country race. The University gives you a decent pair of trainers, and a map. It is up to the student to find the best route.
Sony seem to have gotten a few applications from some students who barely finished the race, and are now tarring the shoe makers..

This is such a complex subject area and I and others in education teaching kids to become games programmers are more than a tad put out, particularly by the poor reporting of the issue on the BBC. People at Sony, et al, are well aware, from their own personal experiences at least, that education is more than training. This isn’t some pointless philosophical exercise, it affects the quality of staff entering the industry.
For example – and I speak as probably the only person who has taught on both of the UK Skillset accredited games programming degrees, and the author of one of them – if we produce people who are hard-core C++ and Maths/Physics coders, but who have no idea of the contextualisation of their skills, then we have failed them and the industry.
OK, today it’s C++ and some physics of light and movement that is required. But, tomorrow it might be real-world physics of p2p communications, or locating complex sounds off- and on-screen using the DVD speakers in a living room, or artificial life in a futurist MMORPG .
C++ may finally give way to another language. How does the programmer taught to code only in this, frankly, god-awful bastard of a language using a clunkware set of industrial tools become a good programmer? I don’t think anyone has an answer. As a former colleague once said to me: it was because I was taught the principles of Computer Science I have survived and understand every innovation that arises.
The answer is not to go back to teaching bubble-sorts and the Towers of Hanoi in Algol on an obscure UNIX platform. Yes, paradoxically, this *can* produce the kind of person who can face the slings and arrows of a career as a computer programmer writ large. But, antithetically, he can’t program a video game to save himself. Which is why we have games degrees in the first place; I know, I wrote the first one.
There is much the industry could do more to support those who are providing free, trained programmers for them. Students training for much more critical work – doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, dentists, etc. – do a lot of their studies in-house with real live people with real world diseases. Yet, we cannot for the life of us get any company to take any games programming student on any real project for any real period of time. ‘Our projects are too critical for that’, they say. What! And the work of the NHS is *not* life-critical, yet *they* can do this?
I’m not into bashing Sony, Microsoft or any of the others whose hand I, ultimately, eat out of. But, I talk to lots of academics at other universities who teach games, many of whom I am in awe of for their skills and knowledge in the field. Yet, very few are interested in so bending their students’ studies that they become Skillset accredited. It’s nice for the two or three of us who *are* Skillset-accredited, and it is for our graduates too, but there is much, much more which can be done to make our games educationalists mesh better with our industrialists
For example, yes, we could do with some more overt support – cash ‘n’ kind – from the various UK governments and its agencies. To wait until the industry all heads cross-pond to Canada is the default, IMHO. There are real opportunities for social change, industrial renewal and stopping the mass-emigration of Brits if we have political support for a major renewing industry such as video games. And, yes, we *do* have this industry now and we *do* have a world-leading position.
We need to keep attracting in excellent new young talent. Kids need to know that reading for a games degree, which is one of the hardest things to do properly, will give them a good chance of a job at the end. Kids aint daft. They can smell crap degrees, crap job prospects and crap working conditions better than we adults can.
Did I mention working conditions in the games industry? Better move on …
There is also in acadaemia the issue of the need for its renewal. Most of us came in in the 60’s – 80’s and are getting, frankly, long in the tooth. Too many conversations begin about the importance of the Spectrum, Donkey Kong and TRON. How do we train new academics? Having survived for decades, from an industrial background, without a PhD I can assure you it is tough for those who aren’t ‘Dr Gamespeiler’. And, if you want to do a PhD in games, and want it from a Manchester, London or Cambridge, it aint easy to find staff at these yoonis who have a scoobie about video gaming.
I have huge respect for those, like Al Houston at Abertay and Phil Carlisle at Bolton, who leapt from industry to acadaemia. But we need more people to do this and ways of making it happen. For example, has any games company considered letting their established staff read for a part-time doctorate in video games? This is how the major computer companies used to retain and retrain their staff, by working closely in these ways with acadaemia. At West of Scotland, we’d welcome such arrangements, and I’m sure everyone else in UK games acadaemia would too.
To conclude, I reckon the words from Sony and the BBC have helped. It has caused a buzz in acadaemia. I for one would be very glad to help us all get our combined act more together. Words are useful, but actions are what we need.
John N Sutherland
Senior Lecturer in Video Gaming
University of West of Scotland

It would be handy if these leading games companies would consider building bridges with universities rather than to just slag off current university course offerings. To say that '95 per cent of video gaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose', is at best inaccurate and, at worst, demonstrates the lack of real research which is being undertaken by the Games On.

The problem from the Education side is the existing business model- still based on 3 year Degrees, expansion, and bums on seats.
Focus needs to shift to other training/education solutions- like research, accredited CPDs (Continuing Professional Development Courses). For instance, re-training existing IT professionals, giving them games skills.

Incidentally, there are plenty of education/training organisations trying to bridge the skills gap. I'm developing CPDs in Maths for Developers and Agile Software Development but am finding it hard to get any Games companies interested in helping me design these courses, which we hope will be subsidised/delivered by our regional Skillset Media Academy.
Anyone from industry interested in having an input? You can forward messages to me via Gameseden.org