Top two reasons why student projects fail

This article is not only for students, but also for faculty who are advising students on their projects (either extracurricular, or as part of a project-based "Capstone" course).

The sad reality is, most game development projects fail. This us true for student projects, and it's also true for big-budget "AAA" industry projects. With industry projects the reasons for this are many and varied, though there are some common themes; there are tons of project post-mortems available for you to see for yourself on sites like Gamasutra.

With student projects, failure is much easier to predict, because I think the vast majority fail for one of two reasons: overscope, and overreach.

Overscope starts like this: "I love playing God of War / Gears of War / World of Warcraft / Something of WarSomething. You know what would be great? If we made a game just like that, only better!"

Some professional industry projects start like that too. These are called "sequels." If made by a different team, they are instead called "clones" (or if you're feeling generous, "homages" or "spiritual successors"). Why can the industry succeed at this (sometimes) when virtually every student team fails miserably?

The main reason is pure hours worked. Let's take a typical console game: you're talking a team of anywhere from 30 to 200 people, working 40 to 80 hours a week, for 2 to 5 years. Even at the low end, that's 30 people x 40 hours/week x 100 weeks = 120,000 hours. Add to this the productivity difference between experienced professionals and totally green students (with programming this has been measured to be somewhere around a 4x to 10x difference), so a high-school or college team would need to put in 480,000 hours to make "the next Gears of War" or whatever. And that's a minimum. For a typical student who has the time to commit maybe 10 hours per week, that student needs 47,999 close friends. It's not gonna happen!

When I see a student saying they've got a 20-person team to make a game, I cringe. That is way too many people; communications overhead will kill the project alone, if scope doesn't! If that many students are interested in making games, they would do far better to organize themselves into a few 3 to 6 person teams, work on separate projects, and occasionally swap around their works-in-progress to the other teams for playtesting and honest feedback.

What's the cure for overscope? Go to the other extreme. Design a game that you can do in one week or less. If the game comes out looking good, you can always spend the next week adding another small set of features. If it comes out horrible, you're not so attached that you can't abandon it and try again with a brand new project. This does mean an adjustment in expectations -- you might not make the next Final Fantasy game, but you can make the next Tetris, the next Everyday Shooter, the next Spelunky!, the next Narbacular Drop. Look at the IGF winners, particularly the Student Showcase winners. Look at the best games from Global Game Jam or other high-profile events like it. Don't make a massive, sprawling game; make a small, tight, focused game that does one thing and does it well.

Genres to stay away from: RPGs, Sims, "open world" games, and anything else that is extremely content-heavy. A student team just can't churn out as much content as a large team grinding for years, so even if you manage to make a working engine (which in itself is questionable), at most it'll feel like a short demo -- several years of your life for ten minutes of gameplay is not a good use of your time. The only exception is if you can distill the genre to its core: an RPG playable to completion in 5 minutes, a Sim with only one action, an "open world" game that takes place within a single screen with no scrolling, or some other ridiculously simplified variant.

Overreach is an entirely separate problem, although it's often true that both problems manifest on the same projects. Overreach sounds like this: "Yeah, I've never designed a game before... and I only know a little programming... but I have this Great Idea for a game, and I'm sure I can figure it out if it means seeing my idea come to life."

Why is this a problem? First, some basic facts about game development:
Designing games is really hard, especially for someone who hasn't done it before.
Game programming is really hard, even for someone who knows "normal" programming, and especially for someone who knows no programming at all.
Making good-quality game art and audio are really hard, especially for someone who hasn't done it before.
Making an original game is really hard, even if you have done it before.

Combine any two or more "really hard" tasks, and it becomes a pretty much impossible task. This is the mistake that an overreaching student makes: they are trying to run without having learned to walk or even crawl.

The cure for overreach is patience. If your Really Great Idea is worth making, learn how to make it before you try to actually make it. If you're learning programming, then just learn programming -- program something that is already designed (i.e. a "clone" of another game), and that already has art (you can either use placeholder images like colored squares that you threw together in Microsoft Paint, or you can use free tile sets available all over the place on the Web). If you're learning game design, just learn design -- make a board game or card game, and stay far away from any kind of programming task. And so on.

Once you've built the development skills, one at a time, you'll be ready to put them together to make an original game. But jump in too early, and you will likely never finish.

Why I Love Social Media

I realize I haven't posted here in awhile, mostly because I've been kind of busy. But something that's occurred to me recently is how social media is becoming a really great thing for games education.

To be clear, most of my students are on Facebook so they can share drunken pictures of themselves with their friends (and then get chewed out by me for it when I point out that this is what their future employers are going to see). My students are generally not on Twitter, and don't see the point. In both cases, I think my students often miss the point, and lately I've taken to being more aggressive about promoting the upsides.

The teachers I talk to are split more evenly. Some are totally into social media, others have dabbled but haven't really taken the next step, and others haven't drunk the kool-aid yet.

Why Students Should Care About Facebook

• Pretty much the entire game industry is on Facebook. If you want to get into the industry, you had better have a Facebook account. This is a great way to keep in touch with people you met at GDC or your local IGDA meeting or whatever. Guess what those industry people post on their Facebook status? If you said "job postings" give yourself a virtual ribbon. (You should probably have a LinkedIn account too, because everyone in the game industry has one of those too, but you can't play games on LinkedIn.)
  
• Like it or not, Facebook is now a non-trivial part of the game industry. Zynga's annual revenue from FarmVille alone is greater than that of most AAA retail games. Social games are a new breed of game (at least on this scale), and students - especially those about to graduate - had better pay attention, because right now there's an increasingly good chance their first job will be working on one of those.
• There's a lot to learn (good and bad) from the play patterns of social games, that can be applied to other kinds of game designs. In particular, the use of metrics to inform design and the ways that games use social cred as a game mechanic are things that can easily carry over into other multiplayer games, from board games to console or online PC games.

Why Students Should Care About Twitter

• The entire game industry is also on Twitter. Unlike Facebook, you don't have to be a personal friend of David Jaffe to follow him.
• Yes, a lot of tweets are things like what your favorite developer is having for lunch that day. Guess what: this is a great way to see game developer culture from the outside. Want to have some idea of what it's like to work with these people? Follow them and see what they sound like.
• Every now and then you get to see some amazing back-and-forth conversations happening in real-time between some of the most brilliant minds in the industry.
• Yes, people tweet job postings, too. Perhaps more frequently than they do in their Facebook status, even.
• If you can't afford to go to a conference like GDC but you're interested in what's happening, follow the Twitter stream. Each individual tweet doesn't say that much, but in aggregate you can extract a lot of meaning and get all the major high points - it's the next best thing to being there.
• Perhaps most importantly - and this is true for both Twitter and Facebook - their value is multiplied once you're actually in the industry. Right now with the social network I have, I don't use social media to swap drunken stories; I use it to swap valuable information. Just the other day, I asked about who had done research into the psychology of how people's estimates of odds/probability go horribly wrong (I wanted this info for a class I'm teaching) and got a bunch of great references. Later, someone I follow asked if there was such a thing as a game design notation, and I was able to point them to two examples. It's like trading money! (And anyone lucky enough to be following either conversation got the benefit of seeing all of the questions and responses in real time.)

Why Teachers Should Care About Facebook

• It matters to students (see above). If your students are trying to break into the industry and this helps them, it should be relevant to you.
• It's an interesting way to connect to your students outside of class, in a more casual/social setting.
• It's a great way to keep your own connections with industry and other educators you know. (And former students who join the industry, who make some of the best connections of all.)
• Facebook games provide great fodder for classroom analysis and discussion about game design. And if you happen to play these games on your own for fun, you'll never be lacking for neighbor requests / item gifts if you ask your students for them ;-)
  
• You can create groups on Facebook, for free, and use these to supplement your classroom learning. Yes, a lot of schools have their own courseware like Blackboard, but that has the disadvantage that it's a separate, isolated place where students have to go. They go to Facebook anyway, so it's a lower barrier to entry if they can post pictures and status updates and then check on their classes as long as they're there.

Why Teachers Should Care About Twitter

• As with Facebook, it's relevant to your students so it should be relevant to you.
  
• If class happens to be scheduled during a big industry conference, keeping a live Twitter feed on the overhead projector is an interesting way to generate some spontaneous discussion (though it can be distracting).
• It's a very immediate way to connect with your class. If you have a random thought from home at 10pm that you think would be relevant for your class, tweet about it and use a specific tag (like your course number) so your students can follow. You can also issue challenges to your students outside of class and have them retweet their responses... like, "change a rule of Tic-Tac-Toe to make it better, in 140 characters or less" and see what they make of it.
  

Design versus Marketing

Students who are hardcore gamers (i.e. most of them, if you're teaching game design) are used to seeing the marketing-speak on the back of a game box (we call this "box copy"). You've seen it before: "Over 30 levels! 300 weapons! Epic, engaging storyline! Intuitive combat system!"

Most of these students have never seen an actual game design document before. This would be the document that actually describes the details. Exactly what are the contents of each level? What are the names, damage, speed, accuracy and other effects of each weapon? What happens in the story, when exactly is each bit of story revealed to the player, how much is text and how much is voice acting, what is every last line of dialogue? How, exactly, does the combat system work and what are the controls? And so on.

It is, apparently, easy to get these mixed up. Box copy is useless if you're giving it to a programmer to implement. How does a programmer write code for "intuitive combat system" exactly? The answer is that they don't -- they kick it back to the designer until they get the details.

I'm seeing this more and more with students lately, and I'll be taking additional steps in the future to warn them of the difference between design and marketing. I wonder if other teachers see this as frequently as I am... and what, if anything, they do about it.

Back to basics...

A student is admiring my Ra board.
"Is that signed by Reiner Knizia?" he asks. It is. He even pronounces the name correctly.

I mention that at home, I also have a chessboard signed by Garry Kasparov.
The student asks, "who's that?"

Sigh.

Just when I think I've got this education thing down, I find out that there's more work to do.

Awkward Moments

A short collection of social awkwardness as experienced by a game-designer-turned-educator, in no particular order:

• Having several students admit that they played a game you worked on, when you know the game in question wasn't particularly good. (Additional awkwardness: when the game in question is M-rated, and you know that the students were underage when they played it.)


• Giving a game design constraint for an in-class exercise, and repeatedly being asked questions about the exact boundaries of the constraint... and realizing simultaneously that my students are trying to weasel out of the constraint (and that I should be annoyed), and also that my students are trying to precisely define the constraint (which is an important skill for game designers, and something I should be proud of).


• Witnessing a student fall asleep in class, and hoping that it's because the student got no sleep and not because I've really become that boring. (Additional awkwardness: waking the student up, and hoping that I done it in a way that I haven't cruelly humiliated them.)


• Assigning a homework that's not only easy but actually fun, and seeing that half the class didn't bother to complete it. And then wondering if my definition of "fun" has changed.


• Writing something out (an assignment, a syllabus, an email, etc.) that I thought was clear as could be, and having students not understand it. This either means I'm not as good a writer as I thought, or that my students aren't functionally literate, or that my students are lazy... and no matter which it is, there's nothing I can be happy about.

About youth being wasted on the young

It may be too early to tell, but already I see a cycle emerging:

• At first, many bright-eyed hopeful students want nothing more than to make the next generation of AAA games. In their spare time, they play certain games obsessively, and it is these games in particular (or others just like them) that they'd like to make.
• Some of these students graduate, get into industry and enjoy it for a time, but eventually get frustrated. They're a small cog in a huge machine, going from one crunch period to another, with no end in sight. In their spare time, they play short games because that's all they have time for, and they secretly wish they were Jason Rohrer or Rod Humble or Jenova Chen.
• Some of these frustrated developers leave the industry for academia, and are frankly amazed at how much of an opportunity the next generation of students has. Why, they could use their talents to make the next big art game that has all of the professional developers collectively salivating at its brilliance! These students have the time, they have the skills, they've got the drive... but all they want to do is make a clone of their favorite AAA titles. Oh, the tragedy of wasted opportunity!

And then the cycle repeats.

I do my best to describe this to my students. In a few cases, they get it. Most of the time, it's like trying to describe working in an office job to a second-grader: the life experience necessary for total comprehension just isn't there yet.

I see other teachers forcing the issue. I hear at GDC of class assignments that involve having students create games that teach, games that inform, games that enlighten, games that have a positive social impact, games that make the world a better place, games that express an emotion (other than power fantasy or adrenaline rush), and so on. These kinds of assignments are a reflection of the instructor's agenda: these are the kinds of games that the teacher wants to make.

If you're a student, looking at the game design assignments heaped on you will give you a clue as to the kinds of things you might really want to make yourself in five to ten years (even if they seem arbitrary or meaningless right now). If nothing else, it shows you how your instructor -- the same person who wanted to make nothing but AAA games back when they were your age, if you can believe it -- has changed over time.

But it is a real shame that a lot of students today won't figure all of this out until it's too late. George Bernard Shaw's quote about youth being wasted on the young is ringing true.

Where Do Game Ideas Come From?

A recent article by fellow teacher/designer Lewis Pulsipher got me thinking about game ideas. A lot of students appear to assume all core concepts start like this:
"It's just like this other game that I like, only with these other elements added that I also like!"

In the real world, games are rarely made that way. There are all kinds of constraints that get a designer started. Some examples:

• A publisher issues an RFP for a sequel to an earlier game, now that the original developers are out of business.
• A publisher acquires the rights to a licensed IP and asks for concepts using that IP.
• A publisher notices there are no announced titles in a certain popular genre within a certain fiscal quarter a couple years from now. You start with a genre, timeline and budget which are all written in stone, but you're free to be original otherwise.
• A publisher notices a fast-growing, underserved player demographic and asks you to make a game to specifically attract that demographic (such as the notorious "games for girls" phase that the industry seems determined to screw up about once every ten years).
• An educational/training company approaches you, asking you to make a game to teach a given set of content more effectively than traditional classroom study.
• A political organization commissions a persuasive game to push a specific agenda or raise awareness of an important issue.
• An indie developer wants to make an "art game" to express their own emotional struggle through gameplay.

I've found the best way to break students of their habit is to introduce them to a variety of real-world constraints, giving them practice in designing games to those imposed constraints. Because game ideas may come from all over, but the ones that get made into AAA games usually come from constraints imposed from above.

Topic for Discussion: Who is the Thomas Kinkade of Game Design?

This came up in discussion with another designer the other day (after a comment along the lines of more game design students these days being familiar with Thomas Kinkade than Reiner Knizia). I thought it would be an interesting open question to repost here.

If you're unfamiliar with Thomas Kinkade, he is one of the more (in)famous painters alive today. You might want to read his Wikipedia entry here to put yourself in the right frame of mind to consider this question.

The question: to the extent that game design is an art form, what game designer is the equivalent of Thomas Kinkade? Or, more succinctly:

Painting : Thomas Kinkade :: Game Design : ???

Some people might consider the label "Kinkade of Games" to be a great compliment. Others might consider it a grave insult. For this reason, I won't hold it against anyone if they choose to comment anonymously.

Students who Know Everything

If you're teaching a class on rocket science or brain surgery, your students are probably not going to enter your classroom thinking that your class is a waste of time, or that they know more than you about your subject.

Mostly, this is true for game design as well (as long as you, as the teacher, have enough credentials to convince your students that you really do know more than them). But game design is one of those fields that everyone thinks they can do, because it looks so easy... so eventually, if you teach game design, you'll encounter a student who is convinced they know something you don't. You say something in class, and they contradict you, right there in front of the rest of the class. They insist that you're wrong, they tell you exactly why. You state your case for why you're saying what you are, but they aren't swayed. The class polarizes, with you on one side and this student on the other, and neither of you apparently willing to compromise.

And of course, game design is a living field, with varying opinions on all sides of just about any topic. So who's to say that you are right? But then, if you're not, how can you be teaching a class where you don't know the right answers... or where there might even be no right answers?

How do you deal with that?

If the point you're arguing about is actually interesting and you can think of any value in continuing, involve the rest of the class. Ask for opinions. Get a discussion going. Some of my best class moments were completely unplanned: a student once asked which was better, save points or save-anywhere, which launched the whole class into a wonderful hour-long digression that was far more valuable than the stuff written in my lesson plans. In addition to the topic itself, your students also learn how designers discuss problems in the field, whether it's in a classroom or a GDC roundtable.

If the student is hung up on some pointless minutiae like the exact definition of a positive feedback loop, exit the discussion. Defer: "I'd be happy to talk with you more about that after class today or during my office hours, but I don't want to get too caught on this one detail. We have a lot of other things to cover today, so how about you give me the benefit of the doubt and pretend that what I've just said is right, just so we can continue to talk about the other topics in class today, and we can look it up later. Does that sound reasonable?" (Bonus tip: If you ask "does that sound reasonable?" about anything, no matter how unreasonable, the other person will probably agree. Most people find it really hard to tell you to your face that you're being unreasonable when you ask.)

Warning: If you defer, make sure to follow up. Otherwise, you give the impression that you're just trying to silence anyone who disagrees with you, and ideally it's better if your class is your partner in education rather than your antagonist.

If the student still keeps disagreeing, as a last resort you can pull rank. You have the authority to send a disruptive student out of the room (worst case, by calling campus security to escort them out), if the student is getting in the way of everyone else learning. I've never had things come remotely close to that extreme, though.


Whatever you do, stay calm. Remember: if a student is arguing with you about anything, it means they're passionate about your subject (enough so that they're able to overcome the intimidation of speaking out in front of a group, and speaking contrary to a teacher!). Passion is a good thing. This student's passion might be misdirected, but it's still there, and I'd say that's infinitely better than a student who is bored, doesn't care about your subject at all, and just sits in the back quietly (or doesn't even bother to show up to class). So, consider it a victory if your students are confrontational... it means you're reaching them.

Online Classes and Readings

Most traditional classes have two kinds of learning: students attend lectures, and they have assigned reading from a textbook.

I say "and" but really for most undergrad students it's an either/or proposition. Lecture and readings are usually redundant, so the students who attend lecture tend to blow off the reading and those who diligently do the reading don't feel too bad about skipping class. This is a generalization; there are plenty of exceptions, students who attend class and study heavily, or classes where the reading and lecture have no common ground. But in a lot of cases, students are conditioned to study as little as possible, and this is an obvious shortcut that can free up some extra time for, say, playing games.

Without going into a discussion of how to change the culture of an entire generation, let's assume that this carries over into online classes and see what happens.


In the online classes I've taught before, there is no "lecture" per se; the lecture has been replaced by... more reading, which was written by whomever developed the online course. So students have reading from the course website, and assigned reading from a textbook. (Visual learners are probably quite happy about this, while auditory learners get screwed, but I digress.)


To a student who sees this parallel of "lecture == course website" the reading again becomes either/or: read the course website, or read the textbook. Naturally, the website wins, so any assigned reading from a textbook in an online class is likely to get ignored by a lot of people.


I never noticed this until recently, when I was grading an assignment for one of the online classes that I was teaching. Most of the students seemed to not understand a particular concept, the difference between constituative and operational rules from the Rules of Play text. It's a difficult concept, granted, but everyone seemed to be misunderstanding it in the same way. What's going on here? Well, I checked the course website to see what it had to say about this concept... and it just mentioned it in passing, giving a couple of examples to supplement the textbook but not really explaining it properly (probably because the course developer expected that students would do the reading). But here's the thing -- you wouldn't notice that the course website's material was supplemental unless you did the reading in the textbook! So all of these students thought they knew what was going on, even though they didn't.


This is, I think, a major hazard for online course development. Here are a few ways around it:

• Warn students early and often that none of the work in the class is optional. (This probably won't work, but at least it makes it harder for students to complain when you catch them slacking.)
• Force the issue. If the graded assignments directly reference parts of the reading that aren't on the course website, students will have to read at least those parts in order to complete the assignments.
• Tape your lectures and put them online, instead of writing text. This requires some extra equipment and technical know-how (and not all course website packages support all kinds of video), but it does at least make it so that the students aren't just doing reading and reading and more reading. If they don't burn through their will to read on the course website, maybe they'll have a few brain cells left over that are willing to take a peek at the textbook. (Bonus: if you already teach a face-to-face class and tape it, your content is easy to develop.)

Culture Shock: Student Passion (or lack thereof)

I've recently mentioned the lack of passion I've seen in teachers, compared to that of game developers. It occurs to me that the same complaint can be made of students.

Admittedly, this is largely the teachers' fault. How hard is it to get excited about something when you're learning from someone in the field who just isn't excited about their own work? Still, it's a bit of a surprise for me, coming from a job where everyone is working together as a team to make games... and seeing students working in a totally different way.

In the game industry, at least on the projects I've worked on, most people care about the project. Sure, if you work really hard to finish the work on your plate, your "reward" is to get even more work piled on you. So if you're cynical, you could say that the best "strategy" is to just do the bare minimum you need to not get fired. After all, you're salaried, so it's not like working harder actually means more money or rewards or anything. And yet... that almost never happens in practice, because the real reward is that your game is better. And if you care about the game, and you want it to be a good game, then you'll do whatever you can to make it the best game you possibly can. If you don't care about the game... well, there's a whole big software development industry out there that has nothing to do with games, which will pay you more money for less work. So people don't tend to become game developers unless they have this drive to make great games.

You'd think that the same would be true of game dev students, wouldn't you? Put a group of students together to make a game, and you'd expect them to all work insane hours and do everything they can to make it the best student project ever. After all, it's not like students can't do amazing work.

But in practice, you don't always see this. Sometimes you get an outstanding student team (usually the result of a single outstanding student leader who pulls the team together, and if you removed that one student the whole thing would collapse). But I'm seeing a lot of cases where this isn't happening at all. Some students don't show up for meetings and don't do any work at all -- as if they wanted a free ride, just a grade, and they don't care that this project is something that could go in their portfolio and get them a job (among other things). Students make excuses about why their work is late, when I know full well it's because they were just goofing off and procrastinating, a sign that they don't really care much about their project (they just see it as classwork, not an original project).

I'm still trying to find ways to make sure students get it, that game projects are an opportunity to create something experimental and new and different and original and really really cool (possibly the last opportunity they'll have for the next ten years of their career), and that they should really care about it. But I feel like it's an uphill battle sometimes, like I'm fighting against a dozen years of "education" that teaches students to jump through hoops for a piece of paper with the attitude that the real stuff comes later after graduation.

And it's a bit of a shock for me, even now, because I don't have to deal with this in the industry. I don't have to ask the programmers on a big-budget game to show up to work and give their best effort, because they already do.

From Gamer to Designer

Most of the people I knew in the game industry who were game designers, were that way from a very young age (myself included). We would make games, even if they weren't very good. When we played games, we would think about the rules. We would write design documents in crayon. It's just something we did naturally, without having to be prompted.

I'm sure that in the game industry, that made game designers easy to screen out. If you ask a question like "what's your favorite game" and then start analyzing that game -- what were the design mistakes (no game is perfect, even your favorite), what would you have done differently, what elements of the game make it so compelling -- the discussion flows naturally with the right candidate. For the people who are more gamer than game designer, though, this kind of question is anathema. "What do you mean, critique my favorite game of all time? It's awesome, it's great, what more is there to say?"

Because that's clearly helpful in a design document, saying that the game should be "great" and "awesome."

Now, I'm in the position of teaching people to be game designers, and it's just occurred to me that my classes have a high proportion of gamers in them, and not everyone sees the distinction. I didn't notice the dividing line in my classes either, until just now when grading the final exam. One of the questions goes something like this: "Write a one-paragraph game concept for a video game that has the following constraints: blah blah blah." And the answers that I get fall into a few different categories:

• "My game will be just like a combination of this game and this other game." Great, but what if I haven't played those games? And how do you plan on being innovative if all of your ideas are based on earlier video games?
• "My game has this story..." Okay, maybe you have a future as a story writer, but my class is in game design, specifically core mechanics. What does the player do?
• A full paragraph with all sorts of things describing how great and fun it will be, with maybe two words to give some clue as to the actual gameplay. These are the fanboys (or fangirls, I suppose, but in my experience it's always the guys that do this). It makes me sad to see that after ten full weeks of learning about how to speak critically about games, as soon as I ask someone to apply it then it all goes out the window and they revert to their earlier fanboy status. I suppose there are some kinds of people that I haven't figured out how to reach yet.
• And every now and then, I see a student who writes a concept that includes a description of mechanics and gameplay. Apparently, it doesn't occur to them that the question would be asking for anything else (and they're right).

Generally, the students who answer in the latter category are the ones who tend to do well in the class overall. It's making me wonder if this is something of a litmus test for game designers: ask an open-ended question that involves designing a simple game concept, and see what people do. Maybe I'll try that on the first day of class next time, as opposed to on the final exam...

And then for the students who aren't getting it on Day One, I need to work out some strategy to get them to abandon their lifelong gamer mentality for long enough to start thinking like a designer.

Spelling Lesson

Game designers have to do a lot of writing. As a teacher of game design, this means I see a lot of student writing. I don't know what they do over in the English department, but whatever students learn over there, it seems like it doesn't always stick. Maybe it's because no one ever draws the parallel between writing in English class and writing for other classes, that you use the same skills. I don't know.

There are a few errors in particular that I see more frequently than others in game writing. Given the importance of writing to a game designer, I think it's fair to say that these are the kinds of errors that could lose a job opportunity if they appear in a cover letter. (Programmers probably get slightly more leniency.)

This is my list of Most Frequent Student Mistakes. If you're a student, learn these, because you might not get marked off in your game design classes but you certainly will in your job application. If you're a teacher of game design, feel free to add your own frequent student mistakes in the comments.

• Bored vs. Board. If you're doing a dull task, you're bored. If you're playing a game like Chess, you are playing on a game board. If you say that you're "board" it means that you feel like a non-digital game component. If you call something a "bored game" it is an insult to the game's designer.


• Lose vs. Loose. If you fail to win a game, you lose. If something isn't tight, it's loose. There is no such thing as "loosing" a game, and you never "loose" a life.


• Roll vs. Role. If you want to throw a pair of dice to get a random result, you roll them. If you are acting in character, you are playing a role. If you "role" dice it means you're trying to behave as if you were one of them. If you are playing a "roll-playing" game you're implying that you do more die-rolling than actual role-playing, which is generally considered an insult.


• Suit vs. Suite. Each card in a standard poker deck belongs to a suit. Hotels and office buildings have large rooms called suites. If you refer to Clubs as a "suite" you had better be talking about a swanky dance club and not a deck of cards.


• To vs. Too. If you could substitute the word "also," use too. Otherwise, use to. Not specific to games but a lot of students seem to have a problem with this and use "to" for everything.


• Affect vs. Effect. For the purposes of describing gameplay affect is almost always a verb, and effect is a noun. A special ability in a game may have an effect on the game, and it may affect your chances of winning. There are rare exceptions to this which can generally be ignored if you're writing about games.


• Know vs. No. If you understand a piece of information, you know it. The opposite of yes is no. If you say that you "no the rules of the game" then... um... well, I'm not really sure what you're saying, but it's not what you think you're saying.

Note that a spelling/grammer checker will often not help you with these, so proofread your own stuff even if Microsoft Word says everything is fine.

I also see some common misspellings, which surprise me in their frequency given that they would be caught by a spell checker:

• Obstacle. Not "obsticle."
• Strategy. Not "stragety" or "stratagy." And learn to pronounce it correctly. I blame Bugs Bunny for this one.
• Ridiculous. Not "rediculous."
• Sense. Not "sence."
• Experience. Not "experiance."
• Explanation. Not "explination."
• Definitely. Not "definately."

Love is in the air...

So, two of my former students got married today. This was not a surprise; I don't think I ever saw one of them without the other for as long as I'd known them. (You can tell they were my students, because the bride walked down the aisle to the theme of Aerith. And the two figures on the top of the wedding cake were Tidus and Yuna.)

It was a strange feeling, being part of that. I certainly never would have dreamed of inviting any of my professors to meet my family when I was an undergrad. (My wife, who tried to get to know some of her professors outside of class, was repeatedly told that it was somehow "wrong" or "inappropriate" or "unprofessional" for reasons that I've yet to understand.) Yet, the whole thing doesn't make me feel weird or freaky. It makes me feel pretty special, actually.

I think this kind of thing might be specific to game professors, and maybe a few other professions. I'm teaching people how to go after their dream jobs, and part of that is learning about what their dreams actually are. Students don't typically seek game jobs for the fame or prestige or high pay; goals and hopes and dreams are always on the surface, and these things are very personal. So, I suppose it's much easier to know students on a personal level if you're teaching in this field, as opposed to teaching calculus, or quantum physics, or signals and systems.

At the same time, there was another strange thing I didn't expect: I didn't actually know anyone in the room. I saw these two students outside of class a lot of the time, so I figured I'd spot at least a few of the people I saw them hang out with. Instead I was in a room with a hundred strangers, and it made me realize just how much I didn't know about them. And I realized I'd felt this way before when I was a student, when I'd see one of my professors in the bathroom or the grocery store or something, and it was like "whoa, they're an actual human being with a life outside of the lecture hall?" And now I see the same thing in reverse -- whoa, my students have actual lives outside of my classes that I don't actually know about! (I used to think this was because there were all these formal barriers between students and professors that the professors put in the way intentionally; now I think it's just a by-product of seeing a person on a regular basis for only a few hours a week, so that you "know" them but only in a narrow context.)

So, for those of you in the industry who are considering teaching, this is the kind of stuff that I hope you have to look forward to. And yes, since I know you'll ask, the cake was delicious and moist.

Good luck, you crazy kids.

The Progression of a Student Developer

Most students start in the same place: "I love playing games and I think making them would be really cool, but I don't know anything about the industry and I don't know where to begin if I wanted to do it myself." (Let's call this Experience Level 0.)

Students level up the first time when they learn the reason why they didn't know where to start: games are made by teams of specialists these days, and knowing programming and art and design and production and audio is just too much for a single person unless the scope of the game is really small. This is around the time they realize there is a community of game developers, and that there are resources like Gamasutra and GDC. At this level, they can try to make their own game, or team up with a few other students on a small project.

The second time students level up is when they actually attend their first GDC. There is a shift in thinking, from "game developers are these legendary people who make these amazing games and I could never hope to be a part of that" to "wow, these developers are real people, just like me." And then the students are suddenly able to talk to professional developers without making fools of themselves. (I do my best to prepare my students for this before it happens, to varying degrees of success.)

The final level-up happens when students have been through a complete development cycle on a game (either at a professional studio as an intern, or on their own student project). At this point they can talk with professional developers at an equal level, contributing to conversations with their own experiences. And then they are truly ready for industry.

As you might expect, one of the joys of teaching is seeing this progression (which, naturally, sometimes doesn't happen at all... and sometimes happens out of order).

Two-Year and Four-Year Students

Having now worked in both a four-year university and a two-year community college, my first impressions of the students are not what the stereotypes would suggest.

The community college, ironically, has less of a sense of community. Most students taking my classes are taking them alone, not with a large group of friends. I think this is partly because of the lack of dorms and other 24/7 student activity on campus, and partly because a large percentage of students are only taking classes part-time.

The community college is far more diverse. Between my two classes I have people from five or six different countries, with an age range that varies from "working professionals with 20 years experience" down to "high-school students taking advanced classes that their school doesn't offer". In a four-year school you're seeing mostly college-age students, with a disproportionate number of locals (or at least, that's what I've seen). I must say, I've grown used to being the oldest person in my classes, and it feels strange when that's not the case anymore.

Community college students seem, generally, to be more prepared before taking a class. More than half of my game industry students knew who Shigeru Miyamoto is (one even recognized Gunpei Yokoi's name), and most had heard common industry terms like AAA and ROI and LOD. In my four-year classrooms, it's usually more in the 10-20% range. If I had to guess, I'd say this is because community college students tend to be older (and therefore more experienced) and also more self-directed. Not every student is a superstar, but there seem to be a greater proportion that are above the curve. (If you were in my classes last year and you're reading this, I'm obviously not talking about you as being anything other than spectacular, of course.)

Most of my community college students are not planning on just getting a two-year degree and stopping. The majority either already have a Bachelor's (or higher) and are branching out into a new field, or they're just getting their general education credits out of the way (where the tuition is cheap) and then they'll transfer to a four-year institution.

I was expecting to have to deal with a lower caliber of student at a community college, but I've been pleasantly surprised.

Communicating With Students

I ran into a friend after the game jam, and we got to talking about (among other things) how teachers throw up red flags to students when they see project scope spiralling out of control.

Instructors say things like:

• "This looks like an ambitious project."
• "That's an aggressive schedule."
• "I think you're being very optimistic."

What students hear, respectively:

• "You're an ambitious student. You've got tons of initiative. You're a real self-starter. That's a valuable thing to have in the world."
• "You've got the guts to do what it takes, without letting obstacles get in your way. Go get 'em, you aggressive tiger you!"
• "You never lose hope or let things get you down, and you've got a positive attitude. I value your optimism."

What the professor actually means, in all three cases:

• "You don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of completing this project. It's way too much work and/or way too advanced for the time you've got available, and if you attempt it you're going to fail miserably... if you don't kill yourself in the process. Reduce your scope and bring things back to something remotely reasonable. But... if you insist on trying and failing anyway, in spite of my repeated warnings, it is your right and privilege to try. But don't say I didn't warn you."

I think we professors need to be a bit more clear. Next time I see an overly "aggressive" student project, I'll be a bit more direct when I say so.

Pieces of Paper

A little while ago, two students presented very different views of my classes.

One student said that he took his tuition and divided by number of credit hours, and figured that he was paying about $120 for each of my two-hour lectures. This perspective made him extremely hesitant to ever miss class -- every time he did, it was like buying two new games and throwing them away!

Another student cynically disagreed, saying that what he was really paying for wasn't class time, but the piece of paper you get when you graduate. To him, the real value of school was its ability to qualify you for a job where you can "do interesting stuff".

The true irony is that this second student was in my Capstone class, working on a team to develop a game!

I wonder how I can best put up a resistance to this second attitude. Other than just being the best teacher I can, of course.

Life Imitates Games

Within the space of one day, I have two student game concepts that are imitated by the real world.

One concept is an anime-inspired "bunny girl versus cat girl deathmatch" sort of game. This morning on the radio I hear about an endangered species of bunnies being attacked by feral cats.
Another student proposed a collection of carnival-midway-style minigames, sort of like the retro game Carnival only with more variety. Today I see an announcement about just such a game, to be released for the Wii.

The news was dated after the assignments turned in, so it's just a really odd coincidence. (Or, my students are just really good at predicting the future. Maybe I should ask them to consider a career in meteorology.)

Bonus coincidence: my Capstone class has been working on a game for the past 20 weeks with the theme of killing your avatar in the most entertaining way possible (as a reversal of the standard goal of saving/protecting your avatar). Then I find a game called Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself)... thankfully, with very different mechanics.

Virginia Tech

I heard about the shootings yesterday morning on NPR. While driving to school. This gives a perspective that you don't really have when you're working for some software company. (Especially a game company. For all the talk of video games causing violence, I don't think there's ever been a single case of a workplace shooting in the game industry.)

It was appropriate for me to say a few words to my morning class about this. I started off by saying that I gave it a week before the first news story linking the killing to violent video games. I forgot about Jack Thompson, who was on the media scene within eight hours. I didn't expect a second volley from Dr. Phil. Ouch.

I said that any student asking themselves Why This Happened will find plenty of easy answers, all of them wrong. Those wishing to find the truth will have a difficult search, but hopefully a rewarding one.

For those students who wanted to explore their thoughts and feelings on the subject further, I recommended two movies and two games to get them started:

Arlington Road. Granted, the movie is about terrorism and not school shootings, but the lesson is the same: lots of people care more about having the false security that an incident is over, than learning the truth.

Bowling for Columbine. A documentary that examines shooting deaths directly.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Despite the obviously-inflammatory title of this game, it examines the anatomy of a school shooting from the inside. My students who played it already said that it made them feel very uncomfortable. And I think that's the point; if you aren't uncomfortable when examining a national tragedy, you're probably taking the easy way out.

Doom. One of the games most often cited as a catalyst in violent crimes. Thus, it's important (especially for students studying video games) to actually play the original game and decide for themselves just how much of a "murder simulator" it really is.

For what it's worth, my students had varied perspectives on the shooting... but we could all agree that our sympathies lay with the victims and their families and friends.