The Games Game October 2011

Each month, industry veteran Tom Sloper provides career guidance to game biz wannabes, newbies, and junior professionals with the goal of helping them break into the industry, and stay in. Submit a question to Tom for developer-oriented advice in this column (IGDA members only).

Fast Track to Learning?

Dear Mr. Sloper,

My greatest passion is to become a game programmer.  I know you are not a programmer, but I know you are a highly experienced producer/designer, and that you teach about games at a university.  

The thing is, everybody here in America advises me to get a CS degree, but it's going to take a long time, and I'll have to waste time in a lot of classes that have nothing to do with programming games. I don't want to waste time in all those general ed, math, science, and writing courses.
What's a guy to do?  I know everybody here in America will want to see a degree on my résumé, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes.  But I want to be programming games, not wasting all that time.

Besides, by the time I graduate, only people in my grandparents' generation will be using desktops or laptops, since touchscreen tablets are taking over.  Keyboards and mice will go onto the technology junkpile with typewriters, tape recorders, and DVD players.  Everything in the game industry is changing so rapidly that everything they teach me in college will be useless.  

Isn't it better to study game programming than plain vanilla programming?  How long are they going to make me tread water until I can program a game of my own from scratch?  Isn't there a fast track to learning what I want to learn?

-- Im Patient

Dear Im,

Game programming is, first and foremost, programming.  Before you can learn how to program games, first you need to learn about programming.  And math, and science.  Math and science go together with general ed to give you a solid rock substrata.  Programming is the foundation that gets built above that, and game-specific material is all superstructure.  So, no, you can't skip the vanilla. 

And those writing courses are very important.  You will find many times in work and in life when written communication skills will prove their worth.  You'll want to express an opinion at work, to convince others of your point of view.  You'll want to apply for jobs or promotions, or even write business plans.  Don't dis those writing courses.

And yes, technology is evolving faster and faster all the time.  But all that new technology is going to be built on and from the old technology.  What you learn now will still be important as a foundational base.  If that was not the case, nobody would ever be able to catch up.  And clearly, it's people who are driving the technology forward, so you needn't worry about such a paradoxical evolutionary process.
No time you spend learning something is "wasted."  You have to get that silly notion out of your head; it's nonsense, and it's poison.  You don't have to worry that your brain will get so full of useless knowledge that your brain won't have capacity to remember everything, come up with ideas, or learn new things.  Nobody's head has ever exploded from too much information. 

I understand that you want to get to your destination faster.  But it is going to take the time it is going to take.  There is no fast track to learning, so you should relax and enjoy the journey. 

Please note that there is no guarantee that Tom will be able to respond to all the questions he receives. It is up to his discretion which questions he uses for this column. For further advice and resources, check out the IGDA's discussion forums, the Breaking In web site and the Students & Newbies Outreach section.

Tom's Bio

Tom Sloper's game biz career began over twenty years ago at Western Technologies, where he designed LCD games and the Vectrex games "Spike" and "Bedlam". There followed stints at Sega Enterprises, Rudell Design, Atari Corporation, and Activision. In 12 years at Activision, Tom produced 36 unique game titles (plus innumerable ports and localizations), designed four games, and won five awards. Tom worked for several months in Activision's Japan operation, in Tokyo. He is perhaps best known for designing, managing and producing Activision's "Shanghai" line. He is currently consulting, writing, speaking, teaching, and developing original games. Find out more at Sloperama.

© 2011 Tom Sloper. All rights reserved.