Integrating Academia - Experimenting for Better Games - Extra Credits

why hasn't the video game industry found some way to integrate Academia the way every other major tech industry [Music] has every major high-tech industry is supported by a robust academic backing everything from Pharmaceuticals to software robotics to energy requires that academic institutions theorize experiment and teach in their field because only academic institutions have the proper incentives to do so let me break that down a bit high-tech Fields need academic institutions to do the sort of long-term research or crazy thinking outside the box studies that don't provide an immediate profit because in a modern business environment that's driven by stock prices and quarterly earnings it's getting harder and harder to justify this type of research in a corporate setting but in an academic institution that sort of research is the path to advancement sure 90% of it may not pay off or it may be mired in minutia but simply doing those studies and Publishing about them counts toward getting tenured and so academics

are incentivized to do them anyway and then when one does actually pay off or when some member of the industry suddenly needs data on some bizarre esoteric thing everybody benefits simultaneously the industry needs trained workers which means that they need highly skilled professionals teaching students or at least mentoring graduate students through projects of course training people on the job is incredibly costly for the industry but for an academic institution the cost of training is actually offset by tuition and the endowments that down the line come from the students that they train and so these two entities the high-tech Industries and Academia have a symbiotic sort of relationship but none of this happens in the game industry we've been vaguely trying to create some training programs but they haven't come together as quickly or ended up being as effective as anybody hoped and I know I've talked about game schools and game education a lot on this channel because it's so important for the industry in the long run but bear with me just one more time because I want to talk about it from a direction we've never explored before mainly I want to talk about the fact that the incentives in current game

Academia are all wrong I realize this topic about the esoteric nature of game Academia may seem a little bit dull for many of you and I promise I will try to cool it with the industry education topics soon but we wanted to make sure that this got out there because it's part of the puzzle that nobody's talking about you see for all the Talking we and others do about how to fix curricula or how to help students nobody really talks about how to make sure that great people stay in Academia to teach and do all that research we so desperately need at GDC Ian horwell of Northwestern brought up a problem plaguing game Academia right now all the ways we try to incentivize PhD students or professors looking to study games are completely wrong the first and most obvious problem is the fact that building games rarely counts toward tenure or getting your PhD most academic institutions are still mired in the old idea of publishing in journals or writing books as the path to advancement rather than participating in the medium itself and this is what leads to the sort of incredibly disconnected

game studies programs we have today and it's not like a precedent doesn't exist for a more active approach in the art World Gallery shows and the like can count toward your academic standing but game professors by and large still can't make games Professor horwell came from a robotics background and he recalled that when he first started in that field none of the academics so much as touched a robot instead everybody just wrote papers because that was the only way to get ahead in the field of Academia it's ridiculous right fortunately the robotics industry rapidly learned that this was silly and now modern robotics Academia is all about proving out your ideas on an actual robot about testing out of theory and practice rather than letting it remain entirely theoretical this is exactly what needs to happen in game Academia if it's ever going to be relevant to the industry but we also need to support that with things that Academia understand we need more awards that are specific to academic games or at least academic interactive media we need to create fellowships along the lines of the Institute of electrical and electonic Engineers the kind of Guild

type organization that presents Avenues to Publications and whose standards mean that achieving certain membership grades can serve as a good Benchmark for Academia these sorts of societies are important because they present a body of qualified individuals working in the field both within and outside Academia to help vet people in a way a new academic field might struggle to do on its own we also need new journals dedicated to this work because while not everything in games Academia should be papers and Theory we don't want to get rid of that stuff completely and when papers do get written we want them to be seen by the people who matter because today when these papers get published they often get published in journals that nobody in the game industry reads and because they aren't game specific journals often even other games academics don't see them to supplement that one of the major institutions doing this needs to essentially create a humble academic bundle or something like it that can basically function as an official academic Journal of games one that fits the medium and counts toward academic advancement we also need more

professor of practice positions that allow people to easily move between the industry and Academia because improving communication between the industry and Academia allowing academics to get experience in the industry and enabling industry people to teach or partake in research are all vital to creating the academic environment that's both useful to the industry and doesn't discourage people from even trying to enter it because they see their options as limited so overall if we're going to have a games industry Academia and we should it has to be about making games we have to find find some way to reward those people not just for writing totally theoretical media studies pieces but for testing out their ideas within the medium we work in otherwise we're never going to get the teachers and researchers this industry so desperately needs I know that this video was really only targeted at a small handful of you but I hope that it at least reaches the people that it needs to see you all next week and we'll talk about something less esoteric I promise oh and stick around for a second I want to tell you folks about a thing so hey do you like game would you like game better if game was mug well

guess what person with weirdly specific taste today is your day because game mugs this little friend would like to join you for tea or coffee or I don't know what what do you drink from a mug it'll join you for that and it's not just mugs games are taking over the extra credit store there's plushies there's shirts and to celebrate we have put together a special because games bundle get all three game items together and we will discount them all by 10% be the Envy of all your friends who really really like the color green [Music]