I am sure you guys can definitely help. Some universities, like NCSU, USC, UCSC for their master's, offer courses based on gaming and game development (some call it MS in Computer Science with an emphasis on game development). I am very interested in this field and I want to give it a shot. But since a master's degree is very costly I have to factor in the future prospects as well. I want to know if this a proper course when a career is also taken into account. Any opinions or ideas? Anyone who has followed this career line?
Answer
I agree completely with mrbinary's answer. I am a student at UNC Charlotte and we have a Game Design and Development concentration with our Computer Science degree (in the Bachelor's and Masters track). Essentially you take four classes: Intro to Game Design and Development, Advanced Game Design and Development, Game Studio (a semester long project class), and an elective class pertaining to something related to games (AI, Games with a Purpose, 3D Graphics, etc.). I also work in a research lab for the University run by the professors that created the Game Design and Development concentration doing research and development of Games with a Purpose. I have many friends who have gone through the program, and I completed it halfway through.
Long story short, everyone I know that has completed the program (some bachelors, some masters) and graduated, then sought out a job in the gaming industry, have failed to get a job. Due to my research work, I have travelled to many game related conferences to present work and see other work in the field, and this discussion has come up a lot. One cool thing about these conferences is that people from industry will attend, as well as academics. What I've heard from many people in industry (and this is backed up by none of my friends who went through our degree program getting jobs in the gaming industry) is that going through a Game Development program may actually hinder your ability to get a job in the gaming industry. This is because the games industry is so diverse in terms of how they develop games. Some companies may use C++ as their language of choice, but use it within a custom engine or a custom framework. Others might use C#, others a scripting language (Lua, ActionScript, etc.), others may focus solely on mobile development and use Objective-C or Java, others may build flash games. The choice of programming languages and development environments are extremely diverse. The problem with Game programs at Universities is it gets you experience in one specific framework and methodology of game development that may not always translate to a game companies needs.
Our program used to teach XNA and C# (which limited us to Windows and XBOX only games), and has now moved into using Unity and JavaScript, as well as WebGL with HTML5. The reason for the transition was that learning XNA and C# for 2 years was getting the graduates nowhere. The game industry has transitioned greatly in the last few years away from consoles to mobile devices and web games, so our curriculum was changed to accommodate for that. It is yet to be seen if this helps our graduates find jobs or not. From my circumstantial observations, plus what I've heard from discussions with people from industry, a Games concentration may not be beneficial when trying to get a job in industry. Of course, if you want to becomes a Games professor, then it's probably just fine! A regular Computer Science degree and some of your own portfolio projects will get you further than a degree focused on games, in my opinion.
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