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videogame school
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Redeye
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

@ Boojiboy and Harveyjames (and the thread in general) :

I am curious about the information backgrounds of people who will be making games for me to consume.


Aside from some atari2600/colecovision, C64 games,and a few dozen PC games, my information gamewise comes from PnP games and raw materials to use with them- SF and a little fantasy plus non-fiction history/geography and science/tech books. Plus as a kid I was a bit of a military otaku (didn't know the term then). Throw in some statistical abstracts/etc.

That is the vector from which I approach video games.

Aside from arcadey entertainment, computer games are largely a way for me to play some form of PnP by myself. (Bioware has dropped the ball and will never get another penny from me. Unless they make something good. The current crop is an insult.)

I have zero interest in WoW/etc.

Eh, perhaps the OP could bring up the issue of game playing background with the other students in a way that doesn't assume certain required knowledge.

When I play a game with military equipment I think "WTF?! This designer was probably jerking off to anime when he should have been using Jane's Fighting Ships as fodder for thought experiments."

Not literally that thing I wrote, but you get the idea.

Different backgrounds could be a good thing, but common information is also necessary.
Do they have "History of Games" classes? Any attempt at filling in a basic knowledge base of pre-existing games?

Of course, it could be that the WoWers in game school really are just fucktards.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, I think both stances are valid, that people don't necessarily need to know about videogame history in order to make good videogames AND that the idea that most of dess's classmates who are at school to make videogames are into WoW and not much else is kind of creepy and depressing* (mainly because while some people might not need a point of reference to create something, it's a big help to most of us).

And another thing I was thinking about, is that comparing something like painting or sculpture or dance, for that matter, to something like a videogame or a novel is also apples and oranges, in the sense that while I could see people coming up with the former out of the blue, who's going to be able to write a novel or create a videogame** without reading or playing?

* - Not that WoW is a bad game. I think it's a really good game that just happens to be in a genre that I find hideously boring. The one bad thing that I can come up about it is that it's failed to transcend the MMORPG genre, which isn't really a criticism.

** - Obviously somebody had to create a videogame without having played one; however, I think that people gloss over the similarity of videogames to games in general. Ultimately, I view both as complex simulation exercises and as such, the concept of a "videogame" isn't completely alien and weird, it's the application of technology to a pre-existing concept.
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Redeye wrote:
Do they have "History of Games" classes? Any attempt at filling in a basic knowledge base of pre-existing games?


Yeah, this is something I was thinking about. A lot of Creative Writing programs have, for undergrads, certain surveys and such that are required. Now, if these are actually good seems to vary based on instructor, institution, and student, but I think the impetus behind them makes a certain amount of sense.

But, more practically, how would one do that for videogames? What games? How much would the students have to play them? If they are skill based games (say shooters), how far do you want the student to get?
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daphaknee
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i think if someone can sculpt elephants without ever seeing one, someone can make videogames without playing them

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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

boojiboy7 wrote:
Yeah, this is something I was thinking about. A lot of Creative Writing programs have, for undergrads, certain surveys and such that are required. Now, if these are actually good seems to vary based on instructor, institution, and student, but I think the impetus behind them makes a certain amount of sense.

But, more practically, how would one do that for videogames? What games? How much would the students have to play them? If they are skill based games (say shooters), how far do you want the student to get?


Hmm, for a history-style class, I could see the licensing becomes a real issue.

Pong would have to be on the curriculum, not only because of historical significance; because of the strength of the metaphor as well (i.e. Primal Game).

For higher-level courses, I like the idea of small units looking at the body of work of a particular designer.


Last edited by Scratchmonkey on Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:05 am; edited 1 time in total
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

daphaknee wrote:
i think if someone can sculpt elephants without ever seeing one, someone can make videogames without playing them


Well, they had somebody to describe what an elephant was to them, or a drawing of them.

If somebody had somebody who had played a videogame telling them what it was like or had a video of one being played, sure, so long as programming was a thing, that would be relatively easy. The concept has been given to them, so the end product might look like a videogame made by somebody addicted to datura seeds; it would still be somebody who had transitively played a videogame making a videogame.

I'm talking about somebody making a sculpture of elephants before there were any, or if there weren't any.
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Redeye
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

"Ellison adapted the story into a computer game of the same name, published by Cyberdreams in 1995. Although he is not a fan of computer games and does not own a personal computer, he co-authored the expanded storyline and wrote much of the game's dialogue, all on a mechanical typewriter. Ellison also voiced the supercomputer "AM" and provided artwork of himself used for a mousepad included with the game."

I know it's not a perfect example.
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daphaknee
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Scratchmonkey wrote:
daphaknee wrote:
i think if someone can sculpt elephants without ever seeing one, someone can make videogames without playing them


Well, they had somebody to describe what an elephant was to them, or a drawing of them.


ohhhhh okay y eah if someone made a videogame before that it would probably be like video mancala or soemthing
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 7:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just remembered this kid who was studying videogames at the same time as I was studying animation, who had like every games console ever up to that point and thousands of games. He justified spending all his money on games by saying it was 'research'. I took a picture of his room!

His dream idea for a game was: 'like the 3D Mortal Kombat games, but with 2D digitized photo graphics like the 2D Mortal Kombat games'. He was an idiot. This isn't to prove a point, just an interesting 'case study', I guess.

I made a dumb-ass videogame around that time, too, because we had a housemate we didn't get on with and one day he just up and left, leaving all his stuff behind, so we made a choose-your-own-adventure game where you get to rifle through all his creepy shit. So you get to relive our day over and over, basically.

http://www.maudevintage.com/jamesharvey/chris/intro.htm The important housemate is 'Chris', everyone else in the game is there to just provide the illusion of choice.
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ryan
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Adilegian wrote:
To use an illustration from philosophy, I'm sure that all of us have reached a profound, sincere proposal about the meaning of life, then later discovered that the thought originated back in the early 1900s (or, more likely, much earlier). That's kind of the same thing... if people don't learn about the wheel, then they stand a much better chance of exerting a ton of energy re-inventing it rather than making, say, a cart.


Ahh, had a good laugh at that. It's always fun when that happens, realizing that you aren't nearly as profound as you thought.

I Have No Mouth, Ellison simply adapted the story, he didn't actually do the design, right? He's done a lot of stuff in film and television, in terms of adapting stories, but I wouldn't think of him as a producer or director. Aside: He has some good commentary tracks on The Twilight Zone, 1980s.

If so, I would say that's a huge difference. Ion Storm was filled with people who didn't have much experience or knowledge about games before being hired on, and all kinds of fun stuff resulted from that. So I wouldn't say experience or extensive knowledge is a must to make something good, but I would say that it's less common for it to be more harmful than helpful.
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Redeye
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ryan wrote:
...
I Have No Mouth, Ellison simply adapted the story, he didn't actually do the design, right? He's done a lot of stuff in film and television, in terms of adapting stories, but I wouldn't think of him as a producer or director. Aside: He has some good commentary tracks on The Twilight Zone, 1980s...


He wanted to make people have to choose how to "lose well" or something like that.
I saw him interviewed about it on some late night talk show.

Obviously someone else did the coding, and I assume a designer had to filter and organize all of the content.
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Mr Mustache
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 11:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Redeye wrote:
Do they have "History of Games" classes? Any attempt at filling in a basic knowledge base of pre-existing games?


It's not uncommon for the creative segment of a discipline to exist in a sort of context free historical vacuum. This always bothered me about studio art courses; any attempts to integrate a sense of the development of a medium, and how we as artists fit within this framework were cursory at best. Granted, it's a problem that often goes both ways.

Anyway, trying to develop a curriculum for this sort of thing seems like it could be fun. There would be a good amount of ground to cover, but a course structured around influential games, their impact on the medium, along with a few significant outliers, would be relatively straight forward.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i don't mean to be snobby, as i think self-identified "gamers" are the people with the least interesting things to contribute to the medium of videogames. but i don't understand why some of my classmates are here: i don't see that passion for the medium, that burning awareness of unrealized potential. how do you do something interesting in a medium when you have no conception of what's worked and what hasn't in the past?
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 1:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Most people seem content with making enough money to buy a condo, car, tv, etc.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 1:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mr Mustache wrote:
Most people seem content with making enough money to buy a condo, car, tv, etc.


Yeah, i think what Mustache is getting here is accurate with regards to your problem dess. You are there to work an artistic medium you find rewarding. A lot of your classmates are there to get a job they won't hate. It is two different approaches, boht of which kinda have their places. It is the difference for me between a lot (though certainly not all in the slightest) journalism majors and creative writing students. One wants to do something they enjoy and get paid for it, the other wants to write no matter what. It is a frustrating divide.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 8:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

harvey james that mess looks a lot like dess's old mess in her NY house

i bet he had a complex system for plugging everything in and everything, and it was totally organized to him

im so glad i set up her new texas videogame set up FOR HER OTHERWISE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN CHAOS AGAIN

also, ma'am is it chaotic again? did you fuck up my wonderful system? is there a tangle of hatred and pain once more?

god i love amplifiers
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 8:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Harveyjames wrote:
His dream idea for a game was: 'like the 3D Mortal Kombat games, but with 2D digitized photo graphics like the 2D Mortal Kombat games'. He was an idiot. This isn't to prove a point, just an interesting 'case study', I guess.

Harveyjames we were all like that once when we were thirteen, don't pretend you were any different.
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 8:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sure, but he was 21!
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

week seven.

now that real work is suddenly cropping up, it's no small feat to finish the personal projects i began last month while completing my numerous class assignments.

completing my own games while turning in quality work, attending meetings to plan team game projects, getting high grades, and still managing to eat healthy and get enough sleep makes me feel like i am absolutely capable of anything. i feel formidable; i stand in the center of my circle.

tomorrow i will stand in front of my instructors and pitch a scrolling shooter. i will be wearing a shirt with a red mystery saucer sprayed on it.

this week is my final trial for this first semester. at the end, i get a well-deserved weeklong break in california with the woman i love.
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 9:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

But the California primaries have come and gone. Hillary isn't going to be there anymore.
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 11:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm glad you're feeling confident. That's great.
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daphaknee
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

wow your shift of attitude from week one to week now is AWESOME


HILARY IS CIRIN YOU DICK I AM THE CALIFORNAI GIRL WOOOO YEAH ITS ME hilary pfft
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 8:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

week eight.

level completed!

this last week of the semester has been weird in that i didn't have much work to do after pitching my game on monday. but that's mostly because i've been really efficient at managing my time. efficient enough to get two of my own projects done alongside all my schoolwork.

there was some sort of exhibition at the school today. big publishers demoing new technologies or something like that. they expected us to be there during the symposiums to fill empty chairs, and told us to wear guildhall shirts so we could answer questions any industry bigwigs had about the school.

i skipped it. the school's supposed to be a resource for the students and not vice versa. instead i spent the time putting the finishing touches on my own game. my education's the most important thing, after all.

and laundry, and packing. tomorrow it's off to california.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yay!
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daphaknee
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 4:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

back off joey, i get her first
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 2:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hahah rawr
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

week nine (intermission).

spent my week's vacation in california with my submissive.

slut was planning stuff to do all weekend, but i told her i just wanted a week to be lazy. and so we spent most of the week in bed, or playing shiren the wanderer together. now that i'm restless again, it's time for school to resume.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 7:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Also we continue to be lazy. Daphny is playing Steambot Chronicles while I finish up some of Sam and Max Season 2.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 6:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
i don't mean to be snobby, as i think self-identified "gamers" are the people with the least interesting things to contribute to the medium of videogames. but i don't understand why some of my classmates are here: i don't see that passion for the medium, that burning awareness of unrealized potential. how do you do something interesting in a medium when you have no conception of what's worked and what hasn't in the past?


It sounds like my course is a bit better in this regard. I think almost all the people here - most of which are self-identified gamers - are quite open to getting to grips with the nature of the medium, and stuff.

Although, because the course itself doesn't really discuss the gamier aspects of game design in great detail, it means there's a lot of people thinking up decent games with mediocre gameplay.

And the most interesting people aren't looking to go into the industry anyway. Like, we have one girl who is a bit of a conceptual artist, who's currently designing an audio-only fantasy adventure for the iPod. And it's really good, except for the fact that she's built it around a load of common RPG ideas (like, the movement and combat sounded like playing Oblivion with a blindfold on), because she doesn't really understand why they exist and what the alternatives are, and stuff.

The real joke is that her game is the one that got the best response from the 'panel of industry insiders' who checked out work out, a few weeks ago. And what are the odds of any of them actually making a game like that?...


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PostPosted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 6:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Incidentally, I've been pushing Mighty Jill Off onto my coursemates over the last couple of weeks. Most of them seem to get it, and like it; others have said things like "This is a terrible game, it's far too punishing".

Which made me laugh.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 9:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

week nine.

our professor added a fourth person to our team game project, then announced a fifty page design document was due in three days.

it was a perhaps necessary reminder that my school doesn't care about teaching us to make good games, it only wants us to be good little workers who won't complain when managers cancel and reassign and redesign the work of our blood and sweat and tears without a word. i shouldn't need to tell you which of those goals i thought i was attending this school for.

one of my classes is a corporate seminar, the other teaches us to document everything so we're expendable at a moment's notice.

the pace of classes is designed to simulate crunch time, all the time, so we'll never complain about the death march.

who was this school built for again?
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 1:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You really should be documenting everything regardless, honestly. When I first started programming, documenting shit seemed pretty silly to me, but as time went by it's become more and more critical, especially as my projects get bigger and bigger over time.

It might seem stupid or silly or whatever when you're making tiny projects like you have been so far, but if you work on some huge project for some company that takes months and months and a long time after you've worked on something you might have to revisit it and you have no idea what you were thinking. Or you have to work on something that someone else was working on and you don't really know what they were thinking (unless they've documented shit).
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 1:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Could be some kind of data-mining scheme.


That you pay for.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 8:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's good that they're working you hard, I guess! Our course tutor was the daughter of a woman who ran a Bed and Breakfast. Her guests were all insane people and heroin addicts, and she was such a soft touch she let them go for ages without paying! It was basically a doss house! Our tutor ran the animation course in the same way! I soon realised my fellow students were mostly all just hopeless cases she had taken pity on, and she let us get away with a lot.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 12:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

weeks ten and eleven.

we're told to think of our school as our employer and our instructors as our managers. my suspicion is the goal of our team game project is to prepare us for dealing with incompetent management. if we produce a good game, it will be to spite them. (or was that "despite them"?)

one of my lecturers spends the first half hour of every class discussing news (which is usually who's suing who over guitar hero and who ea is trying to buy this week). he gets the headlines off of a del.icio.us tag that all of us are allowed to contribute. at some point, somehow, the subject of games as art came up, and he went on a spiel about how "games are a business". i had something to say about that, you can imagine, but teachers sometimes have a habit of not calling on students they don't want to hear talk.

a few days later, derek yu posts about kokoromi's "art of play" symposium. i hit the del.icio.us. my lecturer, of course, has no idea who posts what. when class starts, he asks for whoever posted the link to summarize it. i raise my hand; i get my debate. which boils down to me asking him to recognize that the medium is wider than the industry.

i also incidentally tagged the launching of the independent gaming source's new indie game database, explaining that even outside the industry small developers have ways of getting their games to players. my lecturer asked me, "so how does he make money off this?" i had to have him repeat the question, i was so not expecting it. i said "he doesnt. he does it out of his love for videogames and for indie developers."

this next month my classes will have me working on three games simultaneously. with this in mind, this past weekend i did the stupidest thing i could possibly do: i started working on another freeware game of my own. grades dictate it needs to be the least of my priorities right now, but why then does it seem the most interesting?
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 2:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

god think of all the skills you're going tio get from making shitty games that you'll be able to put towards AWESOME GAMES
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 8:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
my suspicion is the goal of our team game project is to prepare us for dealing with incompetent management.


well, they would be doing you a massive disservice if they did not.

as someone who went to college thinking it to be a four year socratic dialogue, i can appreciate your frustration to some degree.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 4:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think the lessons about industry taught in schools are usually pretty incorrect and that if the artists haven't learned fundamentals including artistic choices, it's impossible to really teach pipeline. It's partially the fault of the studios: they're now insisting schools teach pipeline and industry so that they don't have to, but I'm getting the feeling that the pipelines / challenges they make students face are too artificial to be effective lessons (or just patently incorrect). With the growing number of graduates, the few who demonstrate enough competency and the least amount of personality disorders get hired at our studio (VFX - similar to videogames) and are expected to not be particularly productive for two months while they learn and potentially are a liability for the first. The big studios want to be able to drop someone into a role and then remove them when that part of the pipeline is finished and therefore be geared into this educational experience, but my experience is that it's unrealistic as orientation takes weeks for juniors no matter what their education is.

When I talk to my friends in these programs I'm shocked at the things they are taught, not only for their inaccuracy, but by how much they've been taught about the business and how relatively little they've been taught about the art. Ultimately the people who are the most effective around me are the people who took their education and applied their artistic passion to it.
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 5:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Your teacher sounds like a bit of a fuckwit!

STILL, when I studied animation I would have killed for an industry-based, regimented teaching method over the one we got, where we were just given a room full of stop-frame cameras and some paper and told to watch a bunch of Jean-Luc Godard movies.
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helicopterp
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 8:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

animation and jump-cuts: do they mix harvey?
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 4:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sure, look at Mind Game
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 8:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

going to this school is like paying to be forced to murder the thing you love with your own hands.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 9:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Can you really quantify that kind of experience though?
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fish
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 11:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

the medium is wider than the industry.

such an elegant way to put it.
im really glad our little excuse-to-get-drunk-in-pittsburgh managed to stir a little bit of shit in your classroom.

really.


also, i know how you feel re: the murdering.

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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 3:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

they finally kicked me out.

i was asked to meet with the director of the program and several of my instructors. they were extremely vague as to what the meeting would be about before i showed up, but i wasn't surprised when i found out.

they went to great pains to maintain the illusion that leaving was my decision and not theirs, but there was little room for ambiguity: i was being asked to leave. it felt more like being fired than being expelled, which fits the professional nature of the school, i suppose.

they're refunding me this semester's tuition, and they're selling me my laptop, which is a good tool (especially considering this computer's at the end of her days). i'm as relieved as i am terrified.

i'm going to put a new portfolio together and do some writing while i look for work. i may move back to new york and then on to the bay area. i really am not sure where i'm going from this: they didn't give me a lot of time to think.
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kirkjerk
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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 3:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
they finally kicked me out.
...
i'm as relieved as i am terrified.

i'm going to put a new portfolio together and do some writing while i look for work. i may move back to new york and then on to the bay area. i really am not sure where i'm going from this: they didn't give me a lot of time to think.

Urk. I'm sorry it didn't work out, and irritated with those bozos. On the other hand they were bozos.
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 3:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm sorry to hear it didn't work out, dess. This sounds all too familiar.

Still, as long as you haven't been demotivated to do what you love. I have no doubts you'll be breaking into the industry one way or another anyway.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 5:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorry to hear about this, dess.
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dhex
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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 5:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

that sucks.

it will make for a good story one day, however.
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SuperWes
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PostPosted: Tue May 13, 2008 6:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow. That is insane. I'm sorry. I'm with dhex though on the story, I bet there's an awesome story here that goes way beyond the posts you've made.

If it's any consolation, if it has anything to do with the types of things you've said in your posts I'm both proud of you for sticking to your guns, and disgusted with them that they've created a curriculum that has no room for people who want to learn how to make better games.

-Wes
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