Stay tuned for speaker announcements and ticketing updates; we have some exciting speakers to announce and will also be offering discounts to TIGA and IGDA members.

Our full press release is after the jump.

GAMES:EDU returns to Brighton, Early Bird Deadline Close

Brighton, May 21st. GAMES:EDU at Develop this year will feature sessions given by TIGA, Sony and Microsoft, with early bird tickets priced at just £25 – but only until June the 10th.

Scheduled to take place as part of the Develop Conference in Brighton on July 14th, GAMES:EDU 09 will focus on the current and future needs of the games industry and games academia, offering a sharing of best practice and open debate amongst some of the key players in the industry as well as the future generation of developers, publishers and industry professionals.

The event will feature keynote speeches and presentations from TIGA, Sony, Microsoft, Skillset, the IGDA, and Blitz Game Studios, and will be supported by some of the UK’s foremost games educators from universities including Abertay and Newport.

This year, after a morning of fast-moving provocative talks and announcements, the afternoon Skillset Sessions will also return with roundtable debates to allow everyone to voice their issues and concerns over industry-academia collaboration.

Richard Wilson, CEO of TIGA said: “One of the key competitive advantages of the UK game development sector is the quality of its workforce. UK game developers typically employ highly qualified, experienced and creative people. At the same time, many game developers report skill shortages when recruiting. Games:EDU is a perfect platform to discuss what steps we need to take at a national and local level to provide the games industry with the skilled workforce that it needs to compete successfully.”

Sarah Lemarié, Academic Liaison for SCEE said: “Games:EDU is an essential event in my calendar, because while I do get to visit many universities in the course of my job, rarely will I find people from so many institutions involved in games development in the same place. Similarly for universities it is a great chance to meet with many contacts in the industry, which is exactly what they need. It was the perfect event for unveiling SCEE’s PSP Academic Development Programme in 2007, and I’m looking forward to speaking there again this year. Any university planning or running a games course at any level should attend Games:EDU.”

The special early bird rate of £25 ends on the 10th of June, whereupon tickets will be the normal £95 price.

Visit www.gamesedu.co.uk to get more information, see updates on the programme, and book your ticket.

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Contacts:
David Hayward
david.hayward [at] pixel-lab.co.uk
07976 216 029

Notes for editors:

• Games:EDU is a part of the Develop Conference

• Games:EDU is organised by Pixel-Lab and Tandem Events.

• Games:EDU is the UK’s leading conference on games education. Bringing together games lecturers, developers, and policy makers, it is at the forefront of dialogue between the videogames industry and universities, helping games courses to be more applicable to commercial development, and helping developers to gain a better understanding of academia.

• Pixel-Lab is a computer games and digital media development agency working across the UK’s computer game and digital media industries. Pixel-Lab advises, develops and delivers strategies to support growth in the games industry from skills development to support infrastructure. Pixel-Lab also works with organisations outside the industry, enabling them to harness the power of games. www.pixel-lab.co.uk

I am really excited to announce to friends the live
website of a new project that the SIG is organizing. I hope with your
help to make at a real success with everyone globally. The Global Game
Jam will be announced at Sandbox and SIGGRAPH, where we are doing a
call for host venues and looking for sponsorship money to pull of such
a large scale project. The Global Game Jam is a first of its kind Game
Jam that will take place in the same 48 hours around the world, January
30-February 1st, 2009. Our friends at the Nordic Game Jam will be our
flagship Jam – they have had years of success. This should be a real
experience in creativity, innovation and experimentation.

If you know of anyone willing to host a Game Jam in their local area
or for that matter, help us sponsor the project, please let me know.
Information regarding hosting and sponsorship is available on the site.
We hope to have local jams throughout Asia, Europe, North/South
America, South Pacific… and anywhere else willing to host a jam. The
Global Game Jam is open to everyone. Sign-up for the local Jams will
happen in late October. The GGJ will provide one representative of each
winning local jam a round-trip ticket to present their game at the IGDA
Education SIG Workshop at GDC.

http://www.globalgamejam.org

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this.

Mike is an interesting speaker, who started by asking everyone to switch their phones on and text him comments during his talk. Much of the talk itself echoed Matt Southern’s earlier points.

Mike described the current conflict over games courses as a Cowman/Farmer conflict: The cow men want freedom for herds to graze, and farmers want fences and structure. Similarly, many academics want freedom to pursue interesting research projects, whereas much of industry wants the security of vocational courses encouraged by organisations such as Skillset.

It’s by no means a simple problem. Mike summed up the results of purely research focused courses, as seen by the industry, with this fictitious job advert:

Wanted: Graduate
0 years of industry experience
No portfolio to speak of
Must be incapable of eye contact
No ability to work in a team necessary

Clearly, the balance will continue to be a difficult problem. Games need both vocational and theoretical inputs to survive and mature. Not only will this require new courses, but maybe even new kinds of institution.

Jonathan Purdy (University of Hull), John Sear (University of Derby), Steven Yau (EA), and Gregor White (University of Abertay Dundee) handled the workshops each giving a short presentation then splitting the audiences up for group discussions.

Steven Yau was a former student at Hull, and gave a presentation about the job hunt that led him through a Master’s degree and eventually to EA.

John Sear spoke about the projects they’d done with students, running small groups as imaginary game studios, but putting them under the same pressures. Late changes to projects, firings, even studio closures, the team at Derby have a great deal of fun with the students. Talk of this carried on into the workshops, with one of the main points coming out of it about planning: Such measures are carefully planned at Derby, but introducing them late to a course creates more problems than valuable experience.

A lot of developers say "most games courses suck". This might be true, but so do most games. On the rare occasions that this is pointed out, it’s usually with the euphemism "games are a hit driven industry". Perhaps, at this point, it would be fair for academics to say games courses are hit driven…

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Games have undergone an illusion of progress, because while the technology has advanced year on year, our cultural progress lags behind. In terms of the ladder of cultural forms, games are still at the bottom.

Giles Whitell wrote recently in The Times: "I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them". Matt’s comment on this was "the higher you get up the cultural ladder, the less often you’re compared to smack".

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He also had things to say on game designer input into courses: Ask a game designer what a game is, and they’ll say "Games are interactive entertainment". Ask them to be more specific, and they’ll just tell you their preferences. They’ll probably say little about craft. Stroking a cat is "interactive entertainment", but it’s not Peggle. Games are something different.

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At Games:EDU 07, a lot of developers were telling lecturers that they need more maths and CS in their courses. Games need cultural growth, because if lecturers listen only to us, the industry will just end up with weird, inbred versions of existing developers.

Acknowledging that vocational skills are an important part of games education, Matt also said that games desperately need the infusion of cultural intelligence and maturity.

To illustrate, he referenced the "movie brats" of the 1970s. They were the first graduates from American films schools, who took cinema forward through some radical cultural jumps. Games courses are at the point of spawning such a generation, but won’t be able to do it by only teaching vocational skills.

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The balance of vocational skills and cultural awareness seemed to set the tone of Games:EDU this year, where in previous years it has been more polarised. We’re looking forward to carrying this on at Games:EDU South in July.

We’re proud of the line up of speakers we put on. They, along with all those in attendance, showed a real evolution of the dialogue that was started in 2006 and continued last July in Brighton.

There’s still plenty to be settled in the dichotomy between vocational skills and research, but the way academics and developers are speaking to each other now is much more conciliatory and understanding.

It definitely needs to be pushed further though. While some academics and developers are talking to and listening to each other, there are plenty that aren’t. We’re looking forward to July, when we’ll be putting on the South event with Jonthan Blow, and Mark Morris from Introversion.

Over the next few weeks, we’re also going to be putting things from Games:EDU here on the site. We’ll be putting up speakers slides, along with posts about the talks and articles from the delegate book.