So, You Want to Be a Game Professor?

[Music] so welcome so all week at GDC you've all been those of you in industry have been leveling up your career but if you're at this session might have occurred to you that there's this whole other career track in academia maybe you're wondering if you might want to cross over maybe you're thinking it sounds nice to never have to crunch to meet arbitrary publisher deadlines again you get to mentor a bunch of bright eager young developers who are like younger versions of you and they all love games and they just want to be in your class and they look up to you like a god because you've got industry experience and that's where they want to be you get summers off and you get so you can make games and not just games for a profit motive but just wonderful games that come from your heart something along those lines maybe and if your mental image is something like that then you have about as good an

idea of what it's really like in academia that then grandma's boy has to the actual game industry don't worry though we've got half an hour here so let's cover some reality so first and most important thing is that saying you're a faculty is like saying I'm a game developer there are many different kinds and they all work differently first is the adjunct pay is generally low it's temporary not full-time you have little or no institutional power it's a thankless job you're treated like you're easily replaceable you have no job security past the courses that you're teaching now but a lot of people use it as an entry point either to test the waters or gain some teaching experience and a foothold on the bright side it does tend to require minimal credentials if you have industry experience that's a plus you usually don't need to have an advanced degree or anything like that so it's basically the academic equivalent of QA visiting

professors are like outside contractors it's a full-time gig for a fixed period usually one year one academic year like a contractor you have all the responsibility of getting your work done but none of the institutional Authority since you're the outsider there is one important difference between visiting professors and outside contractors in the game industry though in the game industry outside contractors tend to make more money as base salary because yeah you have to because they don't get benefits because they have these dry spells in between that they have to cover for and so it's understood that you pay a premium on that to cover their extra costs academics are less nice about this so usually it's more like visiting professors make about half of what a full-time set a permanent faculty does but usually do get benefits sometimes as a visiting professor you

can make the case to renew your contract but usually if you like the place that you're at you know you you instead be trying to make the case to convert to permanent faculty from there and that's about as easy as being a freelancer and converting to full-time at a company you're working for it usually doesn't happen and if it does it's kind of a trial by fire thing some visiting professors require an advanced degree and they're basically the school's way of saying well we like you we'd like to have you teaching here but not enough to actually pay you what you're worth or be a permanent employee we just want to try before we buy other visiting professors are a way for schools to bring in someone that doesn't have the academic credentials without getting their kneecaps broken by their accreditation boards because hey they're they're not permanent they're they're just here for a limited time don't worry about it and while you're there they'll try and milk everything they can out of you to help boost their program next position goes by two names professor of practice or

designer or something in residence like designer and residence artist in residence something like that there are some arcane nitpicky differences between professor of practice and resident but they mostly work the same way which is full-time with a split between teaching and actually making stuff in our case making games these positions are specifically for people with field experience so they typically have lower requirements academic credentials you know and there's a focus on actually making games in addition to teaching them so it's a lot of a practice what you preach type thing naturally with so many upsides you may be wondering oh that sounds awesome what's the catch the catch is that there's a very few of these in existence the competition is very fierce so you're not going to get one so this is basically the academic equivalent of entry level game designer or concept artist or producer you know it a few of them do exist not very many don't count on it then

there's the lecturer position this is a full-time position with an emphasis on teaching lots and lots of classes and almost nothing else so this is for people who just want to teach and then teach some more usually lecturers are not permanent instead they're on a fixed term contract sometimes one year sometimes two or three years but you can usually renew indefinitely so when your contract is up you can try and just keep it going and roll it over these vary a bit in terms of course load I've talked to some people who teach as few as four courses per term others that have taught as much as seven and just so you understand the math when you're talking number of courses a typical course you're talking about ten hours of work per week that's just two that includes actually lecturing the course you know or teaching it usually that's just like maybe two or three hours but then you have grading you have office hours all

these other things so it all adds up to about ten hours a week if it's a course you haven't taught before add another ten hours a week of course development and I see some of you doing the math in your heads and yes if you start with four classes a semester and you've never taught before that means you're gonna be having flashbacks to your most recent death march in industry so add a lot of schools lecturers also have very little institutional power so when it comes to things like important meetings about deciding the strategy for the department they tend to be forgotten and they're mostly invisible to administrators so lecturers are kind of like the academic equivalent of game audion that said like audio it is still full-time you still get benefits you still make a living wage and in some schools there is an opportunity for a promotion to senior lecturer and principal lecturer and things like that some schools do that some don't you would have to ask and most schools are willing to substitute field experience

and teaching experience for advanced degrees here for their lecturers so you don't usually need a masters or PhD if all you're doing is teaching and no research though if you have an advanced degree it does help if you have one the downside is that lecturers are also rare and they're becoming more and more rare they're disappearing because schools have figured out that if they just want to bring in someone to teach their classes it's cheaper to get the adjuncts to do it at the top of the pyramid there's this thing called tenure-track faculty and that's what most people think of when they think of a college professor in this varies internationally but in the u.s. the way this works is you're what's called pre tenure for a period of six years and I always thought that was odd like yo it's called tenure you'd think it would take ten years but it really takes six and you have one check point halfway through to find out whether you're on track some schools just use that as a way to give you

feedback of how you're doing and what your strong and weak points are others actually uses a check point where they can just eliminate you if you're not making the cut at three it depends and when the clock runs out at the end of six years then there's basically this all-or-nothing thumbs-up you're promoted you now have tenure which means you pretty much have to kill someone to ever get fired or laid off you have a job for life here or you're fired GTFO methis sounds like a lot of pressure pressure and it is if you talk to junior faculty in most fields they'll act like this is the worst thing ever but we come from the game industry and where can you go in the game industry where you'd get a guaranteed job for six whole years I think that's a pretty sweet deal now that is what I am so maybe you can see my bias here but that's kind of where the action is now it's worth mentioning some terminology here because it's different from the game industry in academia if you're tenure-track but not yet tenured your

job title is assistant professor that doesn't mean you're assisting anyone I don't know why they call it that but that's what they call it if you get tenure then your job title changes to associate professor now in the game industry we use the term associate to mean entry level but in academia it means you're finally one of the people we've actually chosen to associate ourselves with so it's a good thing and after you reach the associate level later on at some point you can request a promote a try for a promotion to what's called a full professor and then your job title gets shortened to just professor so in the game industry going from associate game designer to just game designer is entry to mid-level in academia that's going from mid to senior level now if tenure track sounds sweet there is a downside and that is that this is where you usually require at least a master's degree just to apply sometimes it's PhD or go home

and sometimes they ask for what's called a terminal degree now terminal does not mean it's a malignant degree that kills you although it feels like it sometimes when you're going through it it just means the highest degree that's offered in your field so that does include PhD but it can also include things like MFA Master of Fine Arts if you're in the Earth's MBA for business or professional degrees like an MD for doctors or a JV JD for lawyers there's no higher degree you can get for those things so those count as terminal degrees there's also another position you might hear about from time to time called postdoc but unless you already have a PhD this is not relevant to you basically in the old days when you graduated with a PhD in a field you'd either go work for a company or you'd get a tenure-track faculty job but then school started pumping out more PhDs they could absorb so they had to lengthen the pipeline so now there's this like Ponzi pyramid scheme thing where you've got this kind of sorta position where we like you as a faculty but we're gonna still treat you like a graduate students and then when you're done with your postdoc then maybe you

can apply for tenure-track faculty positions or maybe we'll just ask you to do another postdoc because we're jerks you know so you don't have to worry about that one but you might hear about it every now and then that's what it means now if you ever meet someone who's a tenure track or tenured faculty and you want to really annoy them you can start by asking Oh your faculty what do you teach and the reason this is annoying is that teaching is definitely one of the things that faculty do but we usually do other things too specifically research and service and for some reason academics are obsessed with furniture I'm not sure why but you hear this called a three-legged stool a lot so when we talk about teaching that's not just running a class you do have to run the class but there's also other tasks that count as teaching like designing or pitching brand-new courses for the curriculum which involves lots and lots of paperwork to describe exactly what you're going to do or taking an existing course and porting it to a new format like we used to teach this in a classroom now we're teaching it online

or being on thesis committees for graduate students also counts and when you're being evaluated in your job teaching is mostly judged by student course evals those of you who have been to college remember filling those things out and thinking they're completely useless you know those things downside of teaching evals as they we have a ton of research showing that they do not correlate at all with how good if you teacher you are but everyone uses them anyway and at least there are known ways to game the system if you want like inflating your grades to keep your students happy or being mailed because there's a gender bias among students I wish I was kidding when I said that but I'm really not sometimes you also get peer review if you're really lucky where another faculty you'll sit in on one of your lectures for a few minutes and then try to extrapolate to all of your teaching ever now when we say research this is a very broad top it's more broad than others depends on the school but generally what we mean is being a thought leader leader in your field so

kind of like what you would do at a director level at a game studio except you're doing it for the entire industry and not just that one company it's the academic equivalent of the kinds of people in the industry who keynote at conferences give well attended and high rated talks at GDC the kinds of people who have 10,000 on Twitter and who have a dev blog that everyone in the industry follows that kind of thing and research is usually judged by three buzz words so it's kind of like a recursive stool and the buzzwords are peer review dissemination and impact peer review means we don't just take your word for it that your work is awesome other people in your field agree that your work is awesome and they're willing to say so dissemination means you don't just do really awesome stuff but you also get it out there and tell people so they can see it and impact means that you have some kind of measurable effect on the field like other people are actually referencing your work and building off of it so how many people here are game designers okay how many of you have read

the MDA framework right impact so schools vary in terms of what counts as research and what doesn't the traditional academic form of research is getting published in peer-reviewed academic journals and you typically want a high quality journal that has a high rejection rate because that's peer review wide viewership because that's dissemination and you want your article to be cited a lot by other people because that's impact usually you can count speaking at conferences as part of research again a high reject rate makes it more significant if you're speaking there you can also show impact by numbers of people who attended your talk people who reference the talk later in their work and also things like audience ratings at GDC or best talk or best paper Awards at other conferences some conferences published their proceedings in a journal so you kind of get two-for-one you get a publication Anik research or an end a conference speaking and writing textbooks can count a scholarship and your success metric there for once is actually the same as your publisher you want the book widely adopted in classes in and industry with

really high sales numbers yeah bringing in grants is something you might be judged on a grant it means you're basically saying hey I convinced other people to give me lots of money to do my work therefore I have value realistically if you're consistently bringing in more money than your salary to the from the school then they're never going to fire you no matter what because you're a net positive on the cash flow also realistically most of us who come from the game industry are gonna have a really hard time doing that another way to disseminate your work is Drude exhibitions and festivals having your game nominated for an award at IG F having your game accepted to a festival like indicate or Boston fig or different games or other game festivals this is particularly important for those of us who make games and that that is our primary form of research or scholarship and those of you who would like to do research in the form of making games should now be sufficiently terrified at how competitive these festivals are the last leg of our

three-legged stool is service and we use the word service in the same meaning as community service or public service this is the easy part you can serve on committees at your school be a reviewer who green lights talks or papers for journals or conferences judging games for IGF or indicate or other competitions doing academic advising for students being a faculty advisor for student clubs or organizations like a game dev Club organizing on campus events like global Game Jam or other game jams doing certain you can also do service outside of campus but in the local community that also counts so giving workshops in game design at local high schools or a local Scout Troop something like that you can also do service in the game development community itself doing volunteer work for IG da for example surface is easy but and it's a lot of fun it's also usually weighted much less than in your job evaluation than teaching in research we usually call it a check box and there's not actually a physical check

box on the 10-year form but it's one of those things where you know you just have to put in a few bullet points that say yes I did the minimum amount of reach of service now as game developers you might have had a lot of people ask you oh you're in games what's that like and of course the answer is it depends right working at a triple-a studio is different from working at a bedroom indie which is different from triple I and even within the same class like working at valve is very different experience from working at Blizzard even though they're both triple-a and this is true of schools too each school will have a different emphasis on how they value teaching versus research versus service within each category what kinds of things they look for every school has a different culture in a different community and so just like with game studios everyone is different you're not gonna be happy at all of them because there is a certain you know certain fit for your skills for the types of things you want to do for your culture and so it's important to find places that are a good fit for your

personal desires and strengths so know what your desires are and what your strengths are before you start applying for jobs now speaking of applying for jobs where do you find job postings if you've listened to this and you're like yeah okay I I still would like to take a look at you know academia I'm not running away fleeing in in terror you know where do you find job postings well you know there are a lot of places there are game academic mailing lists like IgD A's game education sig there are various Facebook groups many of those are open to anyone who's interested even if they're not actively teaching or doing faculty things new positions often get posted on these groups that's actually the most common kind of post on the ones that I'm on there are also job postings on Gamasutra and game career guide places like that because you know if you're if you're a school and you are hiring faculty where are you going to think to put your job postings you want if you're looking for someone with industry experience you're gonna put it on places you want to put it in places where people with industry experience will

find it so you can look for jobs there there's also your at GDC there's a ton of schools in the expo hall and the Career Center here and you can just walk up and ask if they're hiring some of them that's the reason why they rented a booth in the first place and hey we're game developers we already live or die by our social networks so if you're in a position to to go public with your desire to cross over to academia you can just ask your hivemind of friends on Facebook and Twitter and other social media you know hey thinking of teaching does anyone know any open academic positions you can do that and you'll probably hear something back if you want to stay local to where you are you can also just research the local schools look around and see you know do they have a game dev program well so you can walk in and ask you know are you are you looking for extra people or sometimes you'll see you'll you can like look at the department and they'll be like they're kind of sort of want to do games but they haven't really done it yet like they have a major in interactive entertainment and a couple classes that are like you know interactive media but

you you know it's like but they don't seem to have a game major yet and you get the feeling that maybe it's because they really want to but they haven't found anyone who actually knows how to make games to teach it and so you can just walk in and cold call them and say like hey looks like you're doing some stuff with games or you want to would you like some help with that oh and by the way raise your hand of your game developer and raise your hand if you're an academic so game developers those people with the hands up for the academics they already know what it's like in academia they don't need to be at this conference or at this session which means there's no reason they should be in this room they're either here because they misread the description or because they're hiring and want to scout the room for talents so you're probably welcome you're probably going to lunch right after this session anyway just ask them if they have lunch plans oh and speaking of my employer RIT is also hiring two full-time lecturer positions one for a visual artist and one for a

graphics programmer if you think it'd be cool to work down the hall from me I also heard from my friend Brenda Romero she's also hiring if anyone has gameplay programming experience and wants to move to Ireland it's probably many other schools hiring too many of them in this room so work the room here and on the expo floor if you're interested once you find a good source of job postings first thing you'll want run into is a wall of required qualifications so that's the downside and this is a lot like breaking into the game industry it looks daunting it keeps a lot of people out so what do we tell students who want to break in write you we all have that conversation with someone like oh you're you're in the game industry I know someone who would love to get into the game industry right and what do we say yo but they can't because they don't have a nice to experience and what do we tell them we say don't let a lack of experience or lack of a job or a lack of talent stop you just make games and eventually the experience and the talent and the job will follow right and the same is true here in academia if you want to teach then teach you don't need a school for that you don't need permission you can find some local kids who want to learn

and you can teach them on weekends if you want you can look for local homeschool communities and pitch the idea to them to say you know do you do enough of you have kids who like to learn how to make games you can talk to local science museums and tech tech museums and see if they have any like you know any desire to host workshops that help people to create in the science and tech areas or you can just talk to your non developer friends and family we all know that conversation that starts like oh I have a nephew who would love to make games right and instead of just saying yeah yeah okay go away you could say oh yeah would you like me to teach them you know or you can put together and run a course online independent of any school I've did that twice and people are still finding it useful there's nothing stopping you from doing that you know it's not like practicing medicine where someone's going to like you know throw you in jail if you teach without a license it doesn't work that way you can find local game to have classes at schools if there are any and find out who's teaching and offered to do a guest lecture every now and then or if there's a student game development

club at a local university you can just offer to run some workshops or lectures for them at their meetings they're usually not going to tell you know if teaching is your passion you don't need any school's permission just teach and just like if game design is your passion you're going to design games whether you get paid for it or not and if you do it enough then eventually you'll find a way to get paid for it teaching is like that - getting experience in research is a little less obvious than getting experience in teaching but it is still very possible I assure you presenting at conferences for example that counts as academic work if you've been in the industry for more than a couple years or so you probably solve some really interesting problems in your work where the solutions would be of value to your peers if you generalize them and you can pitch that to GDC or other conferences that's research but it's also just what we do in the industry like how many of you in industry have spoken before at some conference or other at some point in your life quite a few of you right so you're not as much of a noob as you think you are to academia you can also write a book anyone here redraft casters

theory of fun right that's see impact again right and you don't need to be an academic to write books he doesn't have any academic qualifications he just wrote a book and now everyone's reading it and it gives you academic street cred if you do that another thing you can do is reach out to academics we are all over the place at GDC we even have our own summit that took place a few days ago and just ask about collaborations now you might be thinking about this having this image in your mind of the ivory tower academic the person who just lives in their own bubble doing meaningless research with no practical application who just doesn't care right believe me that is a myth that is an unfair stereotype especially in games virtually all of the academics I know they want their work to be used in the field that's why they became researchers it's just that some of them don't know how and would desperately like to consult with actual game devs so they don't get in over their heads or sometimes you'll find a researcher who does know what they're doing and they'd like to collaborate with industry because it's tactically useful to have industry

partners on certain types of grants or just because they'd like to work with proper developers again and not just students if you can bring extra work to your game dev studio that you're working for now from an academic grant that helps your game development career and gets you research experience and now earlier I talked about degree requirements so for those of you who don't have a graduate degree you have options you can do the job search anyway just with a more limited pool of jobs that are willing to take your industry XP and substitute it for academic credentials keep in mind there are fewer of those and you're competing with everyone else in the room here but that is a possibility yeah the other thing you can do is you can go back to school and earn your degree many schools have part-time options where you can take one or two classes per term while still keeping your day job most of you with industry experience are going to kick the ass of most other applicants to those programs who are coming fresh off a bachelor's degree with no real-world experience which means you've got a decent shot scoring a sweet scholarship to reduce or

eliminate your costs or if you have the means you can go back to school full-time that's kind of the all-in option but that's that is what I did I saved up over really aggressively when I had a full-time job in industry until I had a couple years worth of financial cushion and was able to just stretch that out by doing freelance work on the side while i was doing full-time school generally the higher degree you have the more doors in academia will open for you but also the longer it takes you to earn the degree in the first place and the riskier a proposition it is if something goes horribly off the rails in your academic career along the way at any rate so so it's all trade offs at any rate if you know that you want to be a faculty then the rule is get the highest degree you can but know that there are occasionally job postings with lower requirements and you should keep an eye out for those and be ready to pounce them out on an opportunity so it's basically just like when all of you started out in the game industry and it seemed like the only job postings required 3 plus years industry XP and minimum one ship title and you didn't have any and it felt impossible but

obviously it wasn't impossible because you're here so academia is like that too so there's a lot more I could say about this but for a short time period of a 1/2 hour session this is about all I could cover I did create some extra slides on the job search process and how to get hired and I put those on a bitly link tear so if you want to unlock the bonus content for the talk it's right there right now also here's my contact info I am happy to answer any questions you have over email if anything occurs to you later hi field questions from people in industry about what it's like in academia all the time but I can also take some questions I think I have time for like one or two questions now and I can also be in the session in the wrap-up room after this so thank you hi my name is Angeles Decatur I'm from Sheridan College which is located just outside of Toronto in Canada and I'm here looking for people who want to

teach our probationary he told you yes this is me probation in Canada at our College is one year not six so it's a little bit an easier slide I wanted to ask you though in about the balance between work experience and and and and academics yeah it's yeah so it's usually on a sliding scale but it varies widely by schools there are some schools that really really want the academic credentials and then the industry XP as a plus there are some that are willing to sub XP for academic credentials depending on how much you have you know if you're at the creative director or like director level position with 20 years industry experience sometimes you can get along with just a bachelor's and it's fine in the US the reason the the way it works is it's it's not academic snobbery it's that schools are beholden to their accreditation boards schools are

accredited which means that there's some outside unbiased third party that looks at them and says yes you are actually teaching what you say you are and you get this stamp of approval that basically gives them some legitimacy among students and and everyone else with the you know and and the problem is that a cadet accreditation boards require you to have a certain percentage of faculty with advanced degrees and so it's just kind of a non-starter for them now I will tell you that sufficient amounts of paperwork can make every problem go away so you know if you are will right and you want to teach and normally it requires a master's degree and you just have you know a bachelor's you know you the school can write enough stuff to their accreditation board to satisfy them to say this person is justified as qualified the problem is that you know it's a lot of extra work academics don't have a whole lot of time so for most people they're not willing to do that and they'll just tell you

know and really what they mean is no I don't have the time to deal with this okay I think we are out of time but feel free to follow me to the wrap-up room later thank you