Reactions to an Open Letter

On November 13, John Hopson, a member of Microsoft's Games User Research group, and a former academic researcher, published an article on Gamasutra called We're Not Listening: An Open Letter To Academic Game Researchers. You can read the original article for yourself, but I wanted to recap some of the responses we saw on the IGDA Education SIG listserv.

(For the full conversation, check out the threads in November archives with "open letter" in the title.)

The initial, swift response from Joshua Gross was caustic:

Here's my translation: "We expect researchers to do high-risk development with very practical and applied results. We expect them to produce magic bullets. We aren't willing to support their work in any way, with information, access, money, etc. We will look at anyone trying to succeed as an academic with disdain. We won't offer any reward to anyone achieving what we want, not even acknowledgment. We don't get why researchers aren't producing what we want."

He went on to note he felt that "the article was extremely one-sided. It was entirely a 'you know what your problem is'-type statement."

J.R. Parker took a cynical stance:

I see the game industry as much like the movie business was in the 30's and 40's. There's a studio system, stars, controlled funds, bright lights, and glitz. I no longer expect industry to be interested in my game technology work, and I care about that much less than I used to. One day they will lift their heads and look around. Either they'll be interested then, or not. There's little I can do to speed up the process of evolution.

And Craig Lindley said:

I'm not really sure what the article is supposed to be about, other than providing advice to a small community of inexperienced researchers who would really rather be game developers.

My recommendation would be: quit research and join a game company.

Ian Schreiber brought a fresh perspective to the debate.

I'm the opposite of Hopson, a developer who's just starting to get his feet wet in academia [...] There is a surprising amount of condescending attitude on both sides. Industry workers think of academics as failed game developers who couldn't cut it in the "real world"; academics look at developers as uneducated brutes who couldn't even bother to get more than a Bachelor's degree. Both sides are wrong, but reality is less important than perception.

At this point in the conversation, Susan Gold invited Hopson, the article's author, to the listserv. He expanded upon his arguments in the article, noting that

[s]ome parts of the industry are vastly more accessible than others. In particular, the “casual games” folks (web games, cell phone games, xbox live arcade, etc.) are in a much better position to experiment and try new things than most of the industry. Their projects are smaller and have more room for risks and experimentation than the AAA blockbusters[.]

Frans Mäyrä chimed in:

I can only hope that we do not only have a single-sided responsibility of over-busy academics to try and find the extra time to learn to "speak industry", but we will also see equal efforts within the over-busy industry folks learning to understand the world of science and scholarship. After all, it is those working daily in games development who have the best possibilities of seeing what are the opportunities and consequences of research results[.]

In the end, most participants in the discussion agreed that industry and academia need better communication. (Which is, incidentally, what the IGDA Education SIG is all about.)

Visits to Schools

Over the past months I visited three different schools: Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Computer Science Department at University of Iowa, and Computer Science Department at Drexel University. I had a wonderful time visiting these different units, each unit was unique in its own way.

Sept 27, 2006 - my visit to ETC CMU
I went to ETC to give a talk part of their Seminar series. During my visit, I met with different students and was given a breif introduction on the program, classes, and students' work. This was not my first time to visit ETC, but this visit was interesting, because I got more inside information about students' life and students' prespetive of the program.

One of the greatest strength of ETC is in its teaching methods, which rely heavily on project work. This is a great way to get students to learn by doing and do constant research on the subject of their projects. Students love it there. I think they have a great program and culture that is quite different from what you woud see in a typical university setting. Students tend to work long hours; they also are very self motivated.

I gave a talk about Lighting Design for games discussing a new lighting design system I am developing for interactive environments. The questions and discussions I had with students afterwords was great. One of the students there is working with me on designing or re-desiging the lighting system. I was amazed by the level of knowledge that students have and the different presectives they have on the work I presented.

In short, I had fun. I would advise educators and interested students to look at their program closely. It is very well designed.


Oct 26-28, 2006 - my visit to Computer Science Department, University of Iowa
Computer Science Department at the University of Iowa couldn't be more different than ETC. While ETC is more industry oriented and built around Interactive Entertainment, the Computer Science Department at the University of Iowa is academically oriented and doesn't have a games program or courses. However, I think they have really interesting people doing research in related fields that is interesting for game educators to follow.

I was invited by Prof. Joseph Kearny, who is just a great person to talk to. He showed me the lab he shares with Prof. Jim Cremer, which has a three wall cave with a bike in the middle. They are investigating when and how participants consider the road safe for crossing. They built a 3D environment with roads, and particular traffic patterns, which is projected on the three wall cave. As a participant you sit on the bike and basically drive: steer, peddale, turn, or break. I tried it. It was great.
It was actually fun to sit in the middle of the road and let the cars pass within you, virtually :)
Needless to say, I was not a subject in their experiment. But I think the work is great and is needed, you can learn more about their work at:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/%7Ekearney/

In my visit I met Prof. Juan Pablo Hourcade, whose primary research area is in creating interfaces that support creativity and collaboration. He showed me many very cool demos of interfaces he created for childern, including interfaces for storytelling and digital library. This was great to see. More at: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~hourcade/

Also during my visit, I met Prof. Chris Wayman whose primary area is computer graphics, specifically how to create interactive realistic renderings. Yes, we would all love to see his work in games. He showed me so many interesting demos, including real-time refraction as well as a project he is working on which approximates caustics effects in real-time. For more information, visit his website: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/%7Ecwyman/publications/

I also gave a talk to the department, part of their seminar series. The talk was also on lighting design for interactive entertainment, although not quite the same talk as the one I gave at ETC. I had very interesting and completely different set of questions concerning culture and lighting effects as well as graphics questions - very different presepective than ETC, which was fun.

Nov 6, 2007 - my visit to Computer Science Department, Drexel University
That was a nice visit as well. I guess, I just get invited by all these wonderful people who make my visits super fun...
I was invited by Prof. Frank Lee, who is also a great host. He made great coffees for me, which was great since I drove out to Phili at 5:30am. I am not a morning person.

Frank's background is cognitive science but he is part of the computer science department. He is interested in games, interactive entertainment, and cognitive science. His group is working on very interesting projects that I am not sure I can speak of as they are still under way. But the group was great, I critiqued their ideas and they took the critique very gracefully and responded very well. I was impressed :)

Drexel is certainly an interesting place for a game educator to visit. They have a digital media program which is quite interesting. I met with Prof. Paul Diefenbach (http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~pjd37/) who is in charge of the Digital Media and Gaming area within Drexel. They have two courses targeted at game design and development, where they have teams of 16 students work on one project. That was interesting. The last time I had a team of that size, one team fell apart and the other survived till the end of the course and delivered. I think it needs a lot of work from the instructor to make sure the team does not fall apart. We talked quite a lot about team work and how to sustain it, accountability, assesement, etc. They also showed me many of the students projects, which were really interesting. The games seem to be, from a production 'visual' standpoint, simple, but very interesting from a design 'game play' point of view. The games themselves had complex internal models. Students modeled the worlds from scratch, animated characters, scripted characters' behaviors. Some groups delved deeper into AI, complex sound systems, and visual processing. Most of their demos are avaliable online: http://www.drexel.edu/academics/westphal/portfolio/
We also talked a little about how to cross between programs as this is one of the problems with universities : the rigid discipline walls. The digital media program seem to have been created with interdisciplinary work in mind. They also have great support to collaborate with Computer Science as well as other departments and schools. Some of the student projects are in collaboration with other departments such as medical, architecture, computer science, engineering, etc. I didn't have time to ask them specifically how they made this collaboration happen. It seems that there are many willing collaborators that make it happen.

I had fun visiting Drexel and I would have loved to stay more to assimilate all the demos and other information about the program and ask more questions, but had to drive back.

Magy Seif El-Nasr
SIG Curriculum Committe

Tech Meeting Round-Up

Last night we had our SIG tech meeting. Attendance was the usual crew of Susan, Magy, Darren, and I.

The first topic we discussed was our progress on the Curriculum KB. We're done with our first round of testing, we have a new (hopefully easier) process in place for creating a new Course page, and very soon we'll be inviting the second round of testers to give it a whirl.

Next we discussed the creation of an Education Portal on the IDGA wiki. A portal is a single page that organizes all the information on a wiki about a particular topic. For example, see the Wikipedia Arts Portal. I'll be putting together the first draft this week.

Lastly, we discussed the GDC Academic Workshop, which was mostly Susan recapping the schedule that she and Drew have been working on. We have a bunch of great panel discussions lined up, including a panel on R&D within the game industry which I'm particularly excited about.

Darius Kazemi
Technology Co-Officer