Introduction

The last few years have seen an explosion of colleges and universities offering game design and development courses to hoards of aspiring students. Yet, rightly or wrongly, such courses provoke a decent amount of scepticism from those already working within the industry. While many courses have taken positive steps to address their initial shortcomings, it’s still difficult to argue that there’s a place in the games industry for all the new graduates being churned out. Even with current staff shortages, a game development degree is less likely to get you a job than a strong portfolio and personal contacts.

So what’s the value in teaching development skills to the many students who will inevitably never play a direct role in game development? In this article, I’ll argue that there is a lot of value, and that a more game literate society has many potential benefits for the industry as a whole. These benefits could include the positive knock on effects of more discerning consumers, more women working in the industry, less controversy over violent games, better game research and even better games. Furthermore, you cannot gain this literacy simply by being a consumer of games, and everyone from children and parents to journalists and academics could enrich their understanding of games by creating one of their own.

This is no pipe dream either, as there are plenty of hobbyist tools that allow users of all levels of technical ability to make their own games. So I would like to see game development not just being taught in colleges and universities, but at all levels of schooling, and maybe even at your next office training day as well…

The Back Story

Three years ago, I left the games industry to begin a PhD researching the educational potential of computer games. I was lucky enough to be offered a scholarship by Nottingham University’s Learning Sciences Research Institute to pursue my own research agenda. Developing games had played such a pivotal role in my own creative and intellectual development that this seemed like the obvious place to begin my research. Fortunately, novice programming has come a long way since the days of BASIC, so I was able to teach seven year olds how to make their own games using a picture-based programming tool called Stagecast Creator. The project was a huge success and so popular with the children that my wife (who is a teacher at the school) took over the club and still struggles to keep up with the demand. It also gave me my first insight into the motivational power of games in an educational context, and sparked some of the main ideas behind my thesis research.

The focus of my academic research then moved away from children making games, to children playing games, but my initial experience had been so rewarding that I kept running game making projects in my spare time. I approached the Entertainment Software Charity and obtained funding to run a game development holiday school for teenagers. This time we used a more sophisticated tool called Game Maker, created by Mark Overmars at Utrecht University. It turned out to be a superb teaching tool for both game design and elementary programming principles. Its iconic drag-and-drop programming system is very easy to grasp and allows users to focus on creating good gameplay without getting bogged down by technical issues. It even provides an optional C-like scripting language, which can lead students on to more conventional programming once they become adept at using the tool.

Game Maker’s Drag and Drop Interface is as easy as it looks.

Since then I’ve been involved in numerous clubs, holiday schools and workshops creating games with children. As a result I have no doubt that game development can provide a motivating context for learning a diverse set of skills from programming and physics, to animation and storytelling. I’ve even run a postgraduate module at the LSRI that successfully used game design as a context for teaching learning theory. While these potential cross-curricular links are certainly worthy of further research, it’s teaching the game design skills themselves that has interested me the most. These are the skills that could potentially benefit the games industry, by educating different sectors of society in the fundamentals of game design. I’ll try to explain exactly what these benefits could be, but first I’ll begin with some background theory to add a little credibility to my argument.