AAA Academics: Superstar Designers in Academia

[Music] it's 1:45 I'm gonna kick us off welcome to triple-a academics I want to get straight to the conversation so just a little framing this is a panel with several fantastic designers who have worked and been very successful in industry who have recently and making the transition into academic institutions where they are teaching we have a panel of wonderful wonderful panelists I will introduce them all quite briefly but here immediately to my right is John Romero you may know from such games as quake or doom he also currently teaches at the University of California Santa Cruz and to his right is Brenda Romero who you may know from such wonderful projects as train and Wizardry and she also teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz to her right is Richard Lamarr Sean Richard you may know from such projects as Soul Reaver and uncharted and Richard teaches at the University of Southern California and finally we have Warren

Spector who you may know from such projects as dayz X or Disney's epic Mickey and he now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin so like I said I want to dive right into this I'm gonna ask some questions and hopefully we're gonna have an interesting conversation here when I run out of questions if there's some magical theoretical time at the end we may even take a few audience questions for the panel to answer so I want to start right away by asking how the four of you ended up entering the academic field can you talk just a little bit about how you became interested in teaching in academia whether you were approached by an academic institution or you'd harbored a long passion for it maybe you'd been part time lecturing ok I'm going well before I got into games as anything but an amateur I mean in the 70s god I'm really old but in the 70s I was playing Dungeons & Dragons and all those you know Avalon Hill board games and games like champions created partly by the person sitting in the front row

here and at the same time I was working on my doctorate I think versity of Texas and figured I was heading for a career in teaching it's a long sordid story why I ended up making games instead which I will you if things get really slow but I always thought I was going to teach at some point I just didn't think it was going to be quite this soon I've been making games for 30 years which sounds like a lot but it really isn't it either kills you or keeps you young making games but the University of Texas actually after many many years of many of us twisting arms we just they finally said we're going to start a development program and the day came when I said hey wait a minute if anybody but me is directing that I'm going to be really upset so I agreed to do it and you know I hope like I get back to making games or make some games on the side but right now a little too soon I'm a full-time academic so for my part I guess that I'd

always kind of wanted to be back in in higher education ever since I graduated college I actually remembered telling my friends sooner after I joined the game industry in the early 90s that one day I would have a doctorate of lude ology and they all laughed at me but I'll show them I mean yes I'm not well and now we have doctorates of lude ology so I started volunteering at USC around about 2004 visiting classes giving talks eventually mentoring students in the MFA program I got involved with in decayed in 2009 I've been speaking at GDC since 2008 so I think all of these things were connecting together for me when at IndieCade actually in 2010 I vividly remember where I was I was ironing a shirt in Eric Zimmerman's hotel room and I had this sudden realization that I was heading towards sort of a crossroads in my professional life one of these times when we can where we have an opportunity to make a choice it was about halfway

through the development of uncharted 3 and I realized that while it had the most amazing time working at Naughty Dog it was a superlative place to be I had this opportunity to pursue the love for games and play as art and culture that I've always nurtured really since the beginning of my time in the industry so as I started talking to my friends about what I might do next one of my one of the friends I boat oohs Tracy Fullerton who's the chair of the interactive media and games division that I'm now part of and Tracy suggested that there might be a role available for me so I chased it up and Here I am for me you know mine was really a happy coincidence you know then I've I've gone into academia and then back into the industry and now I'm academia slash industry my current role actually requires me to remain active in the industry which is which is exactly what I want the the first time it was really one of jealousy almost the guy you know is

taking college classes I love learning and as a front line lead designer you know I ended with my friends who were talking like books that had been read you know that were written that I just had no time to read or discussions that I wanted to have about games and a level that we just couldn't do when we're trying to hit milestone after milestone after milestone so much like you I was at a transition point and I happen to see an ad looking for a for a game designer to teach so I I went I you know I ended up accepting that job and good for me once I got in there I'm it was really working with the students that made it irresistible and why I had to go back like my favorite classes to teach her the intro to game development classes because for many students this is they've gotten the you know there may be 18 or 19 this is the first class they've ever taken and game development they've been told all their lives you know this is you want to do what you

want to go to college for this you can pay money for people to teach you games and you see the first time that they're in that classroom and somebody there is validating what they've wanted to do for 18 years and they're on fire and they've got so much passion that's a drug to me you know I just I love that and so you know that's why I keep teaching it's just that's how I got here and that's and that's why I keep doing it I I was asked by a professor at UT Dallas I think in 2002 to teach a class and so I did that probably for like a semester I was across platform game development class and when it was over they basically told me hey why don't we create a curriculum and like get do a game to get a degree here at UT D and I was just like this is not the place to learn game development you know I had seen Full Sail and I was like that is like really intense I'm I I kind of believe in like you immerse yourself

every day for as long as you possibly can in learning how to how to make games and and that's all you do so I just said this isn't the place you need to need a college you know here in in Dallas to do that so it came up with the idea for the Guildhall at SMU and worked on worked with these people to kind of find the right people to start that school mostly because I needed to hire people at my company I want him to come from Dallas I want them to like be local and just like come on over and start working so I never taught at the Guildhall I just kind of started it and then and then later basically working with UC Santa Cruz with my wife Brenda we worked there for a little while basically shepherding students through their final quarter of their BS degree and had been talking to them about starting a new a new mic master's degree program at UCSC so that's what we developed and what we're doing right now and it's a blast getting to work with

you know people that that that know how to code but they really want to learn more about design and how to how to develop really great games and and so that's kind of what we're doing now it's really fun it's exciting for me to hear that you all sort of have a passion for teaching or for reaching the students or for being involved in these institutions you know it seems like in the end whether you were recruited or had tinkered around if there's a joy or a desire that's drawing you in but also like Brenda mentioned she gets to now be a half-time academic halftime industry so what are the obstacles the challenges that you found to taking these positions whether there are challenges of mind this is a choice that I'm giving something up and I'm gonna have to take this other thing what are you giving up and what the other more logistical or odd challenges I'm not thinking of it you might have well at the top of my list in my notes I have fear and self-doubt I

suppose you know major obstacles that we all face in life and you know I guess it was a very big change for me one that I hadn't necessarily seen coming I did have some time to get used to the idea and explore it and talk to friends about it but I'm very glad that I did you know I've always tried to push myself outside of my comfort zone a little bit try and be the kind of adventurous person that I want that I love to be in the games that I play so if that's holding anyone back here who might be considering a change I would say push through that fear of the unknown because it's certainly been an amazingly rewarding experience for me I think one of the things that I know holds a lot of people back in it so if you've actually been pushed out because of this I encourage you to push your way back in is the the degree wall so you want to teach game development you have a PhD no but I've worked on 100 games tough and there's lots of David developers who I knew are ready to move into academia

who really want to do this and are unable to because they don't have a PhD or a masters or maybe in some cases even bachelors but that's changing and I've noticed people I'm noticing people institutions accepting people or willing to work with people who don't have the terminal degree I think another another challenge for a lot of game developers coming in is especially if they're if they're coders so they're coming from game industry code salary and they hear about academic salary [Music] and it's a shock you know and I will say you know one of the things though is being able to balance and it should cut like it's it's full-time academic and then slamming game development in everywhere in all the available hours the is you know supplementing whatever you're doing professionally with whatever you're doing whatever you get from academia with consulting another

another gamedev stuff yeah that's that's that's a wall for many i've experienced all of this so I won't go back over it again for me the most interesting challenge is I never realized how much of my personal sense of self was tied up with I am a game developer and and I you know now what do I put on credit card applications manager but that's that's been a surprisingly steep hurdle that I'm not actually over yet because I didn't have the advantage that some other people who've made this transition had in that I'm building something from scratch the Dean of Sam's gaming Academy literally doesn't exist yet receding our first class on August 27th a date that is burned in my brain out of terror but it's been a full-time job and a half for me and I'm I plan my big master plan was I was going to do a little startup on the side I had some folks who wanted to

fund it you know and no no not yet I'm hoping a year from now you know I'll be able to get back to making some smaller games but right now I can't do that so I what do I call me tell me what I call myself you're you're a game developer okay and I think you can own that you're Warren Spector hey there's no there's no death matching with more inspector could be can just go down there yeah won't be happen Brenda and I both own the game company and it's right across the street from UCSC so it's really lucky for us that UCSC loves that we actually stay active in the industry so we keep on teaching the latest and greatest so we basically just walk across the street back and forth you know I'm actually jealous of that too we were this was gonna be a conversation you guys have each other yeah and I myself as a guy sitting alone

in a room with no windows you know it's it's it's awesome in a way because I just get to make a bunch of stuff up it's like the early phases of me the game I'm making right now is is the gaming academy it's very strange basically what do they need to know yeah what do I want to teach them yeah well and this kind of relates to one more challenge that I have faced which is the challenge of learning a new profession because while I do have a little riff about the commonalities between being a game designer and a teacher of course you know being in a full-time educator is his own profession there's a lot to learn so I've never heard the word assessment until about two months ago oh yeah they're gonna judge you who do you get an A for play the when when I first started teaching I remember I think he's I'm sure Ian Shrivers out there somewhere maybe maybe not but when I was talking with high in when I was just getting into teaching I remember like a week before I

did have this truth this crisis like what if I don't know anything what if and I really did like what if my students what if I come in and I they're like no kidding you can go in and just talk about hitting a milestone and you can talk about just what is your day like in a game development studio and that maybe that'll be new stuff but I remember Ian having to talk me off the edge you know this is after 20 I don't know 25 years in game development one would have hoped I picked up something okay you know but I did I have that feeling it was it was all new to me like having to you know prepare lectures or grading homework you know it's it's uh it was um but still you know very rewarding well so now that I've asked about challenges I mean what are the rewards or surprises even if you've encountered as you can shift it back to me I mean both Warren Richards sort of gestured at this idea that actually when you start heavily designing an academic curriculum whether

on a broad scale or a classic it is some of the work for me um and this is actually riffing off something Warren said to me building building an academic program to me feels like building a game and I'm shipping students all right and I and it's it's all it's very similar like what are all those systems what are the things they need to know in building that and making sure they get it all and also if we're in our first year and you know and I you guys are nowhere close to your first year but it's iterative no matter what you know yeah you have to change because the industry changes and so making you know seeing well okay so now we're the sequel it's the next year how do we want to change it yeah I mean I guess this relates to my riff about the commonalities between being a say a lead game designer and a teacher I was plant really pleasantly surprised by just how much there is in common but

between my new life as a professor and my life as a lead game designer because the classes that I teach are studio classes so just as that Naughty Dog where I would work with a group of game designers and we would all be making work and looking at it and talking about it and giving each other notes and and and debating those debating the the qualities of the game play so I still do just with people with a little less experience but but who are amazing game designers for the bursting with ideas bursting with like critical thought and innovative ideas for innovation and originality and like you say Brenda its we're developing systems processes and we get to iterate on them semester by semester yeah the way I think about it is you know no plan survives first contact with the in the studio but seriously I'm approaching this very much like like I would if I were creating a game and in fact the first day of classes if any of you have already applied or want to

apply or anything I just be warrant day one comment one for me saving one is going to be welcome to the D Nia Sam's gaming Academy version beta one oh because we're gonna be changing it constantly because I mean what I knew six months ago might be out of date already you really have to keep making games to stay wrong yeah which is which is what we do but we actually have a game that's about to ship and we just started developing another big game I'm so jelly also do consulting too so we get lots of input on what's happening and it's useful for the students to hear because we talk about other stuff too we don't just here's here's what we're teaching in this class but we also talked about like here's the latest thing that's happening in the industry [Music] it's it's about learning constantly put

the mic back so I was just asking specifically to go off which on the saying the idea that coming from industry there are especially unique things that they can bring to academic programs I should what more you guys think you do bring having made tons of games and shipped tons of stuff and been doing it for decades that experience is not anything that most students get and I think that's really really valuable because they can we can talk about decades and how it was in that decade we talked about lots of things we've tried and we tried we failed we've done lots

of stuff over the years and having that experience we can tell them what's common and what doesn't change and what's really important I think in the case of all of us our experience is very recent too and in a business in a medium that changes so rapidly I think recent experience is critical i guy right now I'm in the process of hiring two full-time faculty members and one of my requirements is that your experience has come in the last three years and I'm even ashamed to say three years I want your life experience to have been six months ago yeah it's a recent experience I think as well as long-term its last shift game where I see that there's a lot of values it's going back to the how similar it is to being a lead game designer and even though if I'm working with somebody in industry I want my lead to have lots of experience not because I feel that she has done great things during that time but with lots of experience I know that

she has seen things go wrong and the value in a lead to me is that they've seen stuff go off the rails she can spot it a mile away and she's not going to panic about it and so that's the value in a lead and you see over the course of 30 years you see a lot of stuff happen and so you know for instance our students just hit alpha you know and I and I let them know and and I'm sure you guys deal with this too I said and I saw some of you out in the audience saw I mentioned you by name but I know roughly where you're sitting I'm sorry that I said I wouldn't say your name it's all ins anybody named E and I'll be referencing you all anyway when our students you know you can see that just this like everything there's no way we can possibly hit alpha everything's gonna go to hell the whole world's gonna catch on fire and just letting them know like you know what somehow alpha will happen in the world will not catch on fire and you're gonna be thrilled when it gets there and that's just to say that when we're

shipping we don't feel the same way well I mean that's what I tried to do TJ's in the front row and chuckling about this very issue because yeah you know we worked we try and bring the sort of structured methods jeet for students that we've learned in the industry that we've had to kind of struggle to get to grips with in the industry how to hit alpha well how to not slip beta and yeah I think it's always really valuable to make yourself vulnerable to the students to tell them look I know you're working really hard and maybe it hasn't gone as well as you might have liked to make your game feature complete and let me tell you about that one time on this one project we managed to pull it out of the fire at the last minute but that freedom to fail is critical you know and in the game business if I fail too often or too frequently or too recently I get fired yeah in an academic setting failure every failures of learning opportunity one of the things that it absolutely freaks the administrators out when I talk to them about this but I actually

want to engineer failure into the program because every every failure is a learning that's a yeah I mean I think it was Tracy who really drew my attention to the fact that in a way a big failure is a better learning experience than a big success when you're just learning how to be a game developer so yeah I always try and you know embody that rapid prototyping credo fail early fail fast fail often in everything that we do something Brenna said you know the game is not the product in my course the people and the knowledge they gain experience yeah we can at least I hope we can take what would take years to learn and compress it into year I mean you're not going to get it overnight but I think we can do a lot of compression and Excel or a career acceleration in an academic setting but we don't have the time to do if we even know that we have the skill to do it in our real life and with freedom to fail comes tremendous freedom to experiment to innovate yeah because you got to do something to fix

it and we had the same experience with like right now even like with our with our alphas where we had some teams hit a wall where they know that they haven't done something great and they have to do something to fix it because we push innovation constantly while we're while we're teaching it's like if you're not doing something innovative and new and exciting you shouldn't be making that game so that's kind of like one of our high bars that they have to hit and they know when they hit it and then it's time for a redesign or sub reboot or something so they so they've kind of hit that failure point that they've recognized and then they get to fix it and it fix it in crunch mode we can keep going ya know I know you can't I sorta don't want to cut you up I actually I wanna I sort of want to hear before you talk a little bit about crunch visa V V Academy I don't know if anybody has thoughts on that I absolutely do I think it relates to what we were just talking about because you know part of the reason that we want to teach structured production methodology is so we can have the

conversation about quality of life and certainly I have given it to myself as a mandate to address this issue very directly with my students you know the game industry historically has had a problem with crunch with people working too hard for too long and hurting themselves physically and psychologically and often leave it leaving the industry leading to you know this terrible wastage of experience you know as some of our most experienced people leaving the industry and going to a profession where they can have a better work-life balance I mean I think that the game industry has managed to really start to work to get this under control in a lot of very responsible ways in the last decade or so really but I think that we have great opportunities as educators to have really frank conversations with our students about this and while I'm a big fan of working hard in a sustained way for the right amount of time to achieve excellence sort of certainly critical stage of the project I really try and encourage my

students not to crunch you know in the way that that some people do to their detriment I don't know how you guys feel about this you know it's it's interesting the qualit quality of life I mean I feel you know I have conflicted thoughts on it right because I get up in the morning and I'm awake and I'm reading about games or I'm playing a game and then I go to work and and I'm talking about or working on games for eight to ten hours and then I come home and I'm working on games for a couple hours then I might play a game before I go to bed and this is pretty much my life and that is quality for me it would be it would drive other people to institutions I'm sure I've not of higher learning but the other time but that to me is a quality life and and and that and I also recognize that's not for everybody it's also a choice for you I mean it for many of us I don't feel like it was so I've been making like I don't feel like I

could you have a milestone coming up you know you've got a some your publisher throws in a demo that you know that he's required in a week and no you can't have more time I mean that's that's not a choice then oh yeah so I then I still have that publisher so I still eat that but that said you know I don't want the students to overwork themselves I feel like our milestones are reasonable and we do we do talk about that like I tell them about the CEO I worked for who who says he's going to make everybody crunch in January in February and I was on the team and I said why and he said cuz we did it last year and it worked great but there's no goal that you're trying to hit don't care that's an actual cover so I tell the students about that like that is that's that's well thanks I'm leaving crunch and we talked about all the various ways it shows up you know the death marches that I've been on you know had to crunch for nine months seven days a week you know and we talked about the

range of it because you don't want to go into a place where that's happened you know and hopefully but what I try to encourage is you're working on your game every single day you know leaving leaving not planning well and it's to disaster in the end and leads to these type of crunches I think that's the same stuff we would do in industry having said that okay true confessions there are times when crunch is really cool if it's bonding and it's energizing it's it's just it's pretty damn cool a lot of the time just there are times when it's not and and I think what we have to do is communicate to to our students you know when it's too much and why you want to do it and what are the values that they can be gained from it and what are the damages that can be done by it but but I tell you this the freakiest thing to me and maybe I shouldn't say this because it's gonna sound like I'm an advocate of crunch a big way of it the University of Texas shuts its buildings down at 11 o'clock at night you're not allowed in the

building after 11:00 I'm going wow that's so not like everyone takes their laptops outside then and our do that at our small company when we started this this lost company loot drop in 2010 and we started working on our first game we had a really small office space and we had maybe jeez 8 8 people or 10 people working on it and then our company grew to 40 and we'd move to different to different times but everybody remembers that first space and the crunch that we're on is just like the best time they've ever had in game development and it's just because it was a small team we love what we were doing which is the big differentiator between crunch and not crunch and and everybody got to know each other really well never won like each other but for me it's just part and parcel of best practices and good methodology it's just a question of saying to the guys something as simple as hey you know maybe the time when you

should be working hard on your project is not at the end but in the middle because if you're all frazzled at the end you'll make silly mistakes at the last minute and ruin you know and otherwise perfectly brilliant games well and these are the kinds of things that you have to win through experience I think unless you can also just like planning correctly which is obviously what everybody harps on about bad planning leads to crunch leaving lots of time and your milestones is really helpful like right now one of the games that we're developing we turned in our third milestone we're already working on the fifth one and so we're like months ahead which is really great because if it ever gets to a point where a beta is looking like it's going to be taking some extra time we have tons of padding and so if you can plan that and get the right number of people to do that then you don't have a crunch Mathew Burns said this really interesting thing last year that has stayed with me and that I've tried to use he said that because maybe as teachers of game design

we might not have our eye on the ball of the scope of our students designs as we might have at the beginning of their processes and then when we get to what I believe is technically known as the oh moment in the middle of a project when we suddenly realize how much we have left to do the students kind of in school might tend to learn that they have to work harder and harder and harder towards the end so now as a teacher of game design I'm trying to make sure that I work really hard at the beginning of the project with my students to make sure that projects are well scoped and then all of this other good stuff kind of leads from that in a very natural way that leads toward best practices yeah the scoping is like massively important that's like so unbelievably important errors at the beginning magnify over time that's just like basic common common you know sense and so we have a really great advisory board that's there to choose we have our team's design three pitches and the advisory board which is all industry people and academics basically as many

of them come as possible to vet these these pitches and then they get to choose and they get to just critique it and just scope is like the number one thing that they look at whether it's even doable or not and then from that point then they can they can kind of go on with the thing that the industry panels decided this is good but you need to do this you know and try and help us scope at the very beginning before they make more errors that's another interesting advantage of having people who've just come out of the industry I have plenty of friends that I can shame into participating infants program so we have a Development Council as well it's going to be part of the absolutely terrifying review process I hope I mean because it's it's kind of intimidating going I mean I've had to pitch to the CEO of the Walt Disney Company you know and and I remember back in the day pitching to the CEO of Electronic Arts and the you know executive vice president of sales I mean it's pretty intimidating I want I want students to have that experience too because you know you're inevitably going to get up

in front of people who are gonna make you stutter and stammer and and getting that experience before you actually have to do it to get paid I think it's a really good thing this this relates I don't know why what you said made me think of this but what what an early question the challenges one of the things that and you also mentioned something about this going from industry into academia and you mentioned that it's it's a whole different profession which is obvious but just because you're you are a game developer maybe you're even on an award winning game developer it doesn't mean that you have the foggiest idea how to captivate a roomful of people and how to and I and I wished that there had been some little boot camp for so you're a game designer and you'd like to come teach people I'm a teacher let me tell you what I know about working with students nobody on a milestone comes up to me and in you know like I've never had to massively alter someone's life to say you failed this course and I'm sorry but you're not gonna be able to graduate my god Lutie has someone like that

actually I mean I'm sure they have many that there's there's a woman in the in the College of Communication where I am whose job is to work with teachers to make them better teachers right now because I'm too busy but I was meeting with her every Thursday and intend to get back into that at some point I think this is in fact the session where the game designers who may or may not be sitting in the audience and are thinking about moving academia would love those five pieces of advice that each of you wish someone had given you but do you have I mean in that do you have thoughts things that you would tell to a colleague who came to you and said I'm thinking about going and teaching what should I know what should I do how can I prepare learnt learn the meaning of the word assessment and learn the meaning of the word rubric although the rubrics just the rules of the game isn't it ground conditions for the clubs

I would say if you're thinking about it start now on getting your resume and your background together every game every article every award every everything on your resume because that you did a resume that you if you're going to work at know shaving together but if you're preparing a I'm heading into academia CV that's a that's a massive deal like when John was going was looking at going to UCSD and I asked it so let me see a resume and I don't have one you didn't have to make a resume a UCS use this huge machine Big Lots of they knew who you are all the way back to I mean you know every award all the articles and that's important

because especially if you don't have if you don't have a PhD and he doesn't but you have to and I have a you know I have a bachelor's and I'm part way through a masters if you don't have that you have to justify it with experience and all that experience needs to be verified on paper it was a it was a pretty massive undertaking to do that I don't know how generalizable this is but my program is currently a certificate program the university didn't want to dive into a full degree program until it was proved out and as part of a certificate program applicants for faculty positions don't have to I mean I get to just pick yeah it's like an interview just yeah yeah that's I mean that's essentially I determined the requirements the job requirements and I get to interview people and then I get to pick and it's kind of the same with the students I the students don't have to go through this standard you know the main building which is where the admissions department is they don't have to go through anything I would go for a certificate program developer you're thinking to do

and I would do it man I've just I love working with students so much and I love it you know like I'm working on the Trail of Tears game right now what's the ship they don't know you know and then I have that kind of freedom to pursue projects that nobody in the right mind would ever publish and that I'm working with students who are just so incredibly excited like after they hit alpha and and they showed their names in front of the review board the happiness that I saw among them was enough to power me [Music] it really is amazing I mean I guess that would be maybe my biggest piece of advice that you may have heard teachers say you know what makes this experience so meaningful as the students but it's absolutely true it's absolutely true they their energy the ideas enthusiasm of the people that we teach is the most incredibly sustaining thing I think about the experience yeah another piece of advice is I mean I

guess this kind of connects to what you guys have been saying I feel like I began to learn how to be a teacher here at GDC really by being lucky enough to be able to give talks by going to round tables actually and beginning to learn how to have a debate in front of a room of 30 people you know meeting people in the halls meeting some of my heroes you know and so I think that if you once long ago on PBS I heard I wish I could remember the name of the motivational speaker but it was a talk about transforming your life you know if you were perhaps not completely happy with what you were doing and you wanted to create a new career for yourself then the advice that this person gave was to not change it all at once not don't quit your day job and throw all your savings into this new thing but do it bit by bit so consider you know giving a talk at a local community college or you know a local university get involved with the IGA or you know with some other game

development organization and see where it leads because I think that I'm very lucky that that sort of happened to me quite serendipitously suddenly without my realizing it without my planning it suddenly all the stars were aligned for me to be able to move into this role so so I've given a lot of talks at GDC I've given a lot of talks at universities and I may not be any good at it but I'm really comfortable doing it and I I don't know how that I haven't started teaching it the teaching starts in the fall I don't know how that's going to translate to I get I have to get up three times a week and talk for an hour and a half it totally translates weirdoes yeah thanks for smaller audience it really does it does totally translate I have one small caveat I found I'm always chronically over prepared for most everything I do and I one of the tough things that for me to learn has been that I don't need to be quite as prepared with lecture materials and

stuff as as I think that I need to if I have a few good talking points for a class the students will bring all the most brilliant information into the room that's the fits interactive but that's one of the things you need to plan is that it's gonna be an interactive class and mattress that's true lecture class but I don't know if any of you guys caught the great seven exercises for teachers of game design session that was in this room this morning that John sharp and Colleen Macklin ran butt exercises Warren I think they're Mike what my classes love programming tests just throw probably well like I get in the games and I guess they're when they're done with this class they're gonna be in the industry and the more prep that they get more so it's like tears blizzards test if you're coder you know here's one that we give you know just like randomly just they're not graded on it but it's like here's what's gonna happen you know it's very useful you know i one of the things just with

classes is I too would have this this is exactly what we're gonna talk about today you know beep-boop kind of whatever and my current course that I'm teaching fellow I guess it's over now but the current course it's it's over for me [Laughter] it's about non digital game design you know really just right down to the metal how do you and just looking at game mechanics and game design at its most fundamental level and being comfortable in completely derail in a whole class I had about this is this is stupid but this is an idea I had 15 minutes budgeted for discussing what is a game and we actually had like guest speakers come in and you'd see so let's talk about you know I've you know it's interesting to me what is it you'd watch my students ago man being

flexible and some of the best conversations have come up have happened because these are the things that we're going to talk about today and then somehow something else happens and it's a great thing about it's very different in academia that I love whereas if I said yeah we're doing something really cool in our current game what are you doing can't tell you can't share it's like I'll send you all my notes my stuff something all your nose there's no IDs right so it's very it's very open which was something to get used to you're going to post my slides online you know it was it's very free and I like that yeah so what about the other side of this for the institutions should there be any institutions in the room who are interested in hiring hiring high-level game designers to come from industry and

become a part of their program or build a program would you have advice for institutions like that how they can make the position more appealing how they K better prepare pay better how they can also prepare their institution or prepare the situation for success rings in the Craddock barriers I thought Disney had a lot of bureaucracy allowing allowing professors to work on the side is great UCSC lets students own their own IP which is really valuable because it means that they don't have to hold back their best ideas while they're in school they can just make them and hone them and take them out and publish them that's super valuable you know I'm sure everyone's been there we're like that's great idea but I'm not gonna do anything about it yet I think one of the you know I've already talked about the degree wall but I know that affects so many game developers you know some of the some of the best game developers in the game industry don't game developers in the automotive industry obviously some

of the best game developers don't have a a degree but they've got this knowledge that we want so if you're unwilling to allow them to teach unless they have that formal degree maybe give them a pathway where they could do that you know that's that's just such a needless bureaucratic barrier I don't have a degree oh sorry high school diploma that's why in my program I tell people there are three ways into the program graduate from a an existing game development program so you kind of know how to make games already have three ish one to three years experience in the game business and want to accelerate your career path and convince me you're God's gift to gaming because I don't want to be the guy who turns away the next John Rivera I'm not gonna be that guy I guess if I had a piece of advice for an institution looking to attract people from one of the many different game industries to their school it might be to think about what the value proposition is you know for that person

and I think that universities and other kinds of educational institutions have an amazing opportunity right now when so many folks who have worked in one part of the game industry or another have this burning desire to make unique innovative idiosyncratic work and that as you know you were just talking about Brenda we have great opportunities to do that in the Academy so that's certainly something that drew me to USC I'm working on a independent design research project right now and doing things that I always tried to get started when I was working as a you know full-time professional triple-a developer but I just couldn't do because you know my whole mind was full of whatever project I was working on and in any case I've often said that you know being at USC is like being at GDC every day I love GDC so much it would be my one week of the year where I'd really get to come and talk about games and play and

the process of you know designing these these cultural artifacts in a sort of different unconstrained way that's a freedom that we also have in the Academy so that you have a lot to draw people to you so consider how you can articulate that to folks when you're when you're you know doing a job search or whatever alright I well I've done a circle back once more to something they came up early because it's actually my favorite topic which is Dungeons & Dragons yes that richard has really filled my true favorite we're gonna just throw this panel out now and talk about D&D for 15 minutes no times my DM so we talked a couple of times about the similarities between designing curriculum between being a teacher between the shared skills you have whether you're talking to GDC and how much that's like talking in a classroom

or how the system's design work you do as a game designers like the system's design work you do in potentially building the class so are there other things there that are really applicable what are the similarities for you as someone leaving your daily life between having been a game designer and now being a games academic is it a huge change or is it a surprisingly subtle shift well in designing a program again I'm a little bit of a disadvantage here in that I haven't actually started this yet but my process is you know you start with what do you what is the outcome and that's very much the way I always approach design I mean what do you what do you want players to experience what do you want them to feel what do you want them to do what are the verbs and and that's exactly the way I've approached you know the curriculum again it's not just designing a course I'm designing an entire course of study and it's it's very much that you know what is what is the outcome what is the output what are those what are the

players have to have experienced along the way so it's it's very similar in that respect I bet it's going to be a lot like running a paper game campaign for you or oh I if you want to talk about D&D let's go rich is taking over the panel well because I think it is you know those hours you spend in the evening at home drawing your maps and creating the characters and then all of a sudden the players are there in the room you've got your DNA your moderator shield and you know there's my rolling or dice don't forget they all have stat sheets which contain grades I've got it I've got a cunning plan for that but improving I can't reveal all my secrets oh wait I guess for us the similarities are that we're just we're teaching what we know

and so we're still talking about we're constantly talking about the things that we do all the time like some of our classes are how to start an LLC how to handle HR how to get a lawyer just all the stuff because these these people need to start companies they need to start making stuff they need to own IP they need to know the value of IP versus making someone else's IP more valuable and so we have professional courses that are just giving them all the information about like here's my ten startups and how they went and you know just just tons of information about not just the game stuff but what's around the game development and that feel like the life of a game developer a little bit and in the same way we write your life is juggling these 20 things has changed for me tremendously you know being a game developer is that you know when when one of the things that drew me into academia is I felt like having started in game development in 81 there were no programs about making games and so while I was

making games people were studying games and they were writing about games and they were having conversations about games and so I would find myself going to GDC and hanging out with the academic game developers right and very energized by the conversations that I would be having with those people and then I would go back and then I would be on to the next milestone and so going into academia I got to read for the first time a lot of the stuff was written years ago if some of greatest Achaeans early stuff you know which is used heavily in academia and I you know finally got to read a raps book theory of fun and like I finally got to read homo it ends I finally get to read all of this stuff that I had never had an opportunity to because you while you're working in these non puo well today milestone stuff done positions and so for me I now have that time um and and I have time to reread books that I love and I have time to explore questions and just you know

frankly ask ridiculous questions I've had to consider the the the way that we the tactile nature of games which I just you have to make decisions and move on but to actually pause and think that what used to be a tremendous and sometimes impossible luxury I can now explore the most my new game design topics into the ground with a group of people who are also interested and I like that shift in my life you know building on something john said I'm really glad to hear that you're talking about all the stuff around games because as a hiring I'm not hiring except faculty right now but when I hired people out of game development programs I don't want to say always but eight times out of ten I would encounter two problems one is they had experience making their personal passion art project which doesn't really reflect what happens in the real world of mainstream game development okay of triple-a game development and they had no clue about anything but how do you make an art game and so one of the big

things I'm trying to do with my program is exactly what you were talking about you know focus not to the exclusion of everything else but focus way more on on culture quality of life business you know production methodologies the other problem that I encountered with people coming out of development programs is they so often think they know the right way to do something and they know one of the right ways and I really want to expose people not just to the right way according to me but but in an academic setting I think there's an opportunity to show them the various ways you can actually tackle the same problem if I might suggest you start with what is the definition of game [Laughter] yeah I had one thing on my mind to do with the similarities between being a game designer and a teacher I don't we've sort of touched on it a little bit so far but I guess it's connected to the fact that I've always tried to be kind of a player favouring game designer so I

really like the idea of a game designer as an advocate for the player and for the players experience and obviously as designers we're free to create any kind of experience for the player that we want from one this cozy and warm and safe to one that's like punishingly difficult and but you know the kind of games that I've worked on my personal design philosophy is to do with kind of bringing the player into the experience and then bring them along through the experience in a way that is best for them if I can possibly work out how to do that with my game design so I guess just before I started working at USC I read a little bit of bell hooks bell hooks is an American educator and she talks about the way that in the classroom because of the sort of implicitly hierarchical nature of the classroom there's a possibility for oppression in there if the professor

doesn't engage with the students in the right way if they don't draw the students out if they don't kind of establish parity in the community of the class and so I don't know I don't have strongly developed ideas around this yet but I think it's important for us as new professors to think about this because this is very much part of the the skill the profession of people who have been you know teachers for many decades for all their professional lives okay I do have time for one possibly two questions I saw Tracy's hand first and then I saw somebody over here I saw a hand over here oh it was that hand and when I say oppression I just mean when we're working on critical working critically on creative projects you know that we've all heard about the horrible art critter someone makes themself vulnerable and and crying I do think it's important that we're direct with each other when we criticize each other I really like their examines thing about the as game designers the way we show each other

respect just be by being direct with one another but it's a big complicated subject where there's lots for all of us to learn okay Tracy I'll repeat it if you guys you know are coming from industry into academia here's something I'm always fighting okay so so I also came from industry but maybe you know and have been more on the side of academia for a while and what I'm always getting as the industry folks coming and saying you ought to do it like this you ought to be doing it like this right and it's usually something like hey you know an industry we have people we have 200 people team so you guys got to have 200 people teams we got to get you some 200 people teams okay let's work on that that's great that's great but guess what I don't know if they're ready to be on 200 people teams yet

maybe we should have teams of two and you could like maybe learn to be on a team because as above so below they're little microcosms of the macroscopic negotiate what industry wants us to be teaching and what we know they're ready to be learning well I think this is a really important sort of negotiations you want to say I don't want to teach that because you do what you want to teach the steps because I wonder all the time okay I think you may be selling yourself a little short as someone who hired hundreds and hundreds of people over the last several years there was a point where having a degree especially one in game design or development was like it was a knock it was it was against you you know and that is no longer true at this point I don't think I hired anybody in the last five

years who didn't come out of you know your grammar one for one like it so I think you may be selling yourself a little short you're doing plenty right the one thing is I sort of alluded to it earlier but I think there and I think some places like you guys are getting at it and you guys are getting at it I think somewhat larger teams are necessary and that's why in my program I'm a lot of people think I'm crazy by the way but everybody in my program is gonna work on one one big in air quotes game I mean 20 people on a team is it's I picked that number because it's just big enough to start seeing the communication and coordination problems and planning problems and I don't like you problems that you don't see on a team of four six or even eight where hey we're all friends let's work together so I don't think you need 200 but I think you need somewhat bigger teams which I know you guys are doing already so you're you're right on track but I'm guessing I'm guessing that what Tracy is suggesting is that just as game design is when we're designing a game for a player it's

not great to introduce too many verbs all at once you know we want them to get the hang of the climbing before they do the Dino jumping I think that's what Tracy's alluding to and so we sort of structure our teams to start small and then grow to sort of 20 person teams just takes a bit of deliberateness about everything well what we do in our program at UCSC is we focus on real small teams and we focus on developing like indie developers that can make an entire game themselves and teams right now our teams are like three people like three develop three designer programmers with 20 artists so they have plenty of we will never see it again so they have access to an art team like we tell them it's downhill from here yeah you're never gonna see this this quality and amount of art for a small team like that but as the program gets bigger we

probably won't have teams that are bigger than five people just so they all have really great experience you know they can't hide in a big team they have to make something that that is innovative and they all have to have a really part of that of that of that game so they as I can say yeah I made that huge thing and also they they feel like they really made a whole game to to Tracey's point I had I it's almost like my previous week was a set up for that single question I began my week meeting with one massive publisher and I ended my week meeting with one massive publisher and I had first party interaction in the middle and everybody knows exactly how things should be done and none of them are in agreement with one another and so it's really just a question of well you know I'll align a Scott foe credited him with this line but it's good to know it's very non-committal it's good to know I mean

you can't ultimately you can't make you can't make a game for everybody really unless it's minecraft so now it's done and you know likewise I don't think you can necessarily make students or have a program that's for everybody you know so you'd have to you know what art what are you most still doing and then go from there but I but it's certainly and I felt that pole just last week the where there was I'm afraid I won't have time for the second question because we are ending in 30 seconds unless you can do it in 15 seconds even yeah so who are you shipping John shipping John answered that a little bit and Brenda touched on it but who are you shipping and how do you build the program and what do you advise 15 seconds 15 seconds what's your plan I'm doing this forever but my product is people who aspire to positions of leadership production and direction and want to shorten the dues-paying period there so instead of 10 years it takes you 5 yeah innovators industry leena leaders and craftspeople

I think indie devs artists or indie devs they own their own company and they build small teams and great games awesome I also wanted to take keep chance my little plug chance here real quick at the end to make sure you all know that the third edition of Tracy Fullerton's game design workshop came out this week and in features sidebars from Richard and Brenda designers perspective from Warren and there's a whole chapter analyzing quake visa Vigo fish there are discounted copies available for GDC attendees and I have tickets for them so right here at the end if you want one come up and grab one from me then please can we have a huge round of applause for our panel they did a fantastic job and thank you all for coming out have a good GDC