::fibreculture:: Games industry discussion

Tue Jan 22 18:26:38 EST 2008

Hi again.

In regard to Christian's insightful comments on list activity: his post
reminded me of another observation.

Fibreculture discussions sometimes had an element of reactivity, which,
while no doubt wearisome for the moderators at times, did help to generate
an air of liveliness and engagement, even in the form of (as Melissa pointed
out) the flame wars we all remember.

Pehaps the nature of email lists fueled this. There you are, email inbox in
front of you, thinking of something else, when in comes an email containing
a fibreculture post. You read it and fire off a response (like I'm doing
now). Compare that to taking the active step of deciding to check out a site
or topic, choosing to go to a research blog, digg, SNS and taking part in a
discussion there. You're in a different frame of mind: prepared and ready.
Emails interrupt your day and catch you unawares. That is, they used to when
we still had the time and attention to read them all.

In regard to games teaching:

We've found that our games graduates do generally tend to find work and, as
always, it's usually the more entrepreneurial and motivated ones who find
the best work first - the students who actively pursue internships, awards,
conferences etc. The work is both in platform games and in related fields
such as 3D visualisation, Flash & mobile gaming etc. Interestingly, we've
also found that the cream of our general multimedia students are
increasingly finding work in games-related fields.

I work in the TAFE system and while there's been a lot of talk about the
importance of 'employability skills' (formerly 'generic skills'), to the
extent that they're now being embedded into Training Packages, at the
coalface there still seems (in the TAFE area anyway) to be a lack of
understanding of the increasingly 'mix'n'match' nature of the workforce. I
suspect the rhetoric about skills shortages is being somehow being
interpreted by government as a need to focus on 'hard skills for industry'
(ie the sausage factory) and that making arguments for the importance of
developing transportable design, entrepreneurial, management and people
skills could well be seen as a copout by low priority areas not churning out
engineers, nurses etc. In which case it may be harder to argue for this,
unfortunately.

Cheers,

Stefan

-- 
::Stefan Schutt
::Project Manager/Teacher
::School of Creative Industries
::Victoria University
::stefan.schutt at vu.edu.au
::(03) 9919 1583/0410 387 622

> From: Christian McCrea <christian at wolvesevolve.com>
> Reply-To: <christian at wolvesevolve.com>
> Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:25:54 +1100
> To: Melissa Gregg <m.gregg at uq.edu.au>
> Cc: <list at fibreculture.org>
> Subject: Re: ::fibreculture:: Games industry discussion
> 
> Thanks Melissa,
> 
> I would just like to also thank Tom and Jean's links relating to Auran
> and Fury. Theres a few issues dovetailing
> in this discussion, from the games industry question, to the teaching
> of games, and to Fibreculture / list activity.
> I'll seperate the issues for now even though the strength of Melissa'
> post was to link them:
> 
> Games Industry
> -----------------------
> The collapse of Auran was important, but not catastrophic, by all
> accounts of people involved and more intimate
> with the processes of the company. It is neither representative of the
> Australian game development community
> nor particularly instructive as an example of what King's article saw
> as 'spin'. An exterior analysis of Fury is only
> that - exterior - but I would hazard a guess and look at the noises
> made by departing staff that it was not entirely
> unforseen. In short, the product didn't so much fail, as the process.
> Even highly successful MMORPGs aren't
> always developed with a sound economic strategy. The whole point of
> the developer's association's discussions
> about more funding from government are to forestall some of the
> effects of producing games in Australia, and it is
> possible that Fury may have been a different product with different
> circumstances. However, the game's design
> puzzled many people (including game academics) following its progress
> through the vital pre-release and Beta
> cycles. The entire methodological superstructure of games -
> prototyping and experience - misfired in this case.
> Although as said, without more intimate knowledge, any more discussion
> of Fury is pre-emptive of comments that
> may appear in a future post-mortem.
> 
> There is this one on F13.net:
> http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=626#more
> 
> Its clear from this interview that King was categorically wrong. It
> was not a case of "Developer's expectations far
> exceeded market capabilities" but that the team went through a faulty
> process and the game never really had a chance.
> The strength of the industry is reflected in the voracious speed of
> pick-up of key employees from many Melbourne
> companies.
> 
> Games Education
> --------------------------
> King's numbers are probably quite low; I would expect a couple of
> thousand more enrolled students in game-related courses
> across the country by now. Where an opportunity lies for games
> academia is to communicate on a very basic level that these
> courses are not a sausage factory for industry. Many, if not most of
> the students I've met from Swinburne, RMIT, Deakin and
> Monash are very entrepreneurial and are keen to create for themselves
> a creative career using skills they are assembling
> on their own terms. Which sounds frightfully like a normal Bachelor
> degree graduate, in the end. It may be incumbent on us
> to communicate that games design processes teach all manner of skills
> and behaviours that are becoming more and more
> important across digital and sometimes non-digital industries.
> Graduates are ending up working across areas, adding interactivity
> to websites, helping design children's toys, consulting for government
> - just to name examples I'm aware of. The process of game
> design education is offering skills usually thought of as the domain
> of the managerial and technical schools.
> 
> Fibreculture and List Culture
> -------------------------------------------------
> If people are posting or writing elsewhere, then it should be
> discussed in order to gauge what FC does and doesn't do for its
> members;
> that would be healthy. I'm not aware of any lists that survive now
> that aren't very closely regulated and match the tempo of a bulletin
> board forum, most of which now use PhPBB. The inter-linkage is now so
> thick that perhaps some of us feel that posting to something
> like FC is not as effective as finding something on the web which can
> generate more discussion - and many people have their own
> research blogs. Often, these blogs have that little area with littler
> icons; linked.in, flickr, facebook, twitter, etc - that they are worn
> on the right side of the blog jacket like medals from the Queen. Which
> is fine on its own terms, but perhaps technology has moved on
> from email so much that a new format - forum or otherwise - may make more
> sense.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Christian McCrea
> Lecturer in Games and Interactivity
> Swinburne University of Technology
> 
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