A Career in Video Games - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

I've always been a games player uh that's been my passion and uh I always wanted to turn my hobby of playing games into a business of making them and way back in the 1970s I started a games company called Games Workshop with a school friend of mine Steve Jackson and we moved out of selling games mail order launch Dungeons and Dragons we then took role playing games to a wider audience by creating a series of interactive books called fighting fantasy uh books in which you were the hero killing monsters again and finding treasure making a game experience of a book confronted by fire breathing Gorgons you can look in your pack for something to offer them turn to page 36 or turn to page 90 draw your sword and fight them one of those books was called death trap dungeon and uh I was contacted by a startup video games company called doar who asked me to write the storyboard and design for their launch game Eureka eure it's great fun cuz I've been playing computer games but didn't know anything about how they were made so I had to work with a team of programmers and artists in making Eureka and saying was a completely different skill set and especially one was a ethereal process with millions of lines of code and I couldn't code still can't code it's a bit of a strange uh science for someone of my age to to start learning now joined doar and selling out of Games Workshop and doar metam Morphers into OS and I became chairman of the new entity which was Flo on the lungan stock exchange and then we acquired a studio was developing Tomb Raider and launch Tomb Raider so this whole boom in the console cycle I was uh very much part of and very much enjoyed and realized what an amazing talent this industry is you know huge teams of artists and programmers and artificial intelligence programs 3D programmers 2D programmers all the art and animation and storyboarding and narrative and camera and lighting and you know physics and maths and and the compan combination of Art and Science that goes into making a game it's like making interactive Cinema is uh it's it's just uh extraordinary the skills required to do that and it's was during this process of of of developing games that I realized that um there simply weren't enough programmers of the high enough caliber in the UK to support an industry in which we got off to such a Flying Star in the 80s now this was down to program being taught in schools you know the BBC micro was a Cornerstone of computing in schools so it's not much to look at but the beauty of it is you can get into programming so easily doing this and in the home everyone had a Specky an affordable programmable computer which costs not very much and so we got off to a wonderful start you know the early days in the UK of games such as uh manic Miner and populace and then we went through the tomb Raiders and Grand Theft da and more recently Moshi Monsters and uh and RuneScape and other great successes um but it could have been so much more I was asked to chair skill sets video game skills Council looked at all the universities which had games in their title and found that for most part they were not fit for purpose they offered soft skills uh you the culture of games uh the the role of of games in society and a little bit about design but they weren't teaching what we needed which was the hard skills necessary to make the games you computer science uh coding art and animation and they were doing students a great disservice because they thought they're going to come out these courses and immediately get jobs they weren't because you effectively having to be retrained and of the 144 cases that were listed um skill set only accredited 10 of them as being fit for purpose so I talked at length to Ed VY uh the culture Minister here in the UK about this problem and he invited me and Alex Hope from double negative to write a review about the situation that review was called nextg in a digital age schools and universities are failing the creative industry next GM was a review with the main recommendation to have computer science on the on the school's National curriculum as essential discipline plus 19 other recommendations for government industry and education and um whilst it got you know received well within our Industries it didn't really make National headlines until Eric Schmidt chairman of Google referenced NextGen in his Matt taget lecture I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science is not even taught as standard in UK schools now your it C Curriculum by the way focuses on teaching how to use software but it doesn't teach people how it's made this risks throwing away your great Computing Heritage and of course if Eric said it it must be true and a month later the Prime Minister echoed his words in his speech at Tech City and uh we were suddenly invited in to discuss computer science and NextGen had highlighted not just the problem in universities but the cause that led to the lack of computer science being taught in higher education and further education that being the ICT is currently taught was largely a strange hybrid of office skills kids were learning at school word PowerPoint and Excel they're using learning how to use technology but were given no Insight how to create their own technology we were in effect teaching them how to read but not how to write we were making digital consumers but not dig creators now the UK happens to be pretty good at creativity look at our film our fashion our music our design uh our advertising uh and of course our games and we're very good at high technology yet Against All Odds we managed to put kids off learning about how to create technology despite them running their lives through through smartphones and social media and by the way we taught is at school so we need to excite them get them to understand how to create technology because as soon as you get kids coding it's just amazing the response you get from them they've created something they want to share something you feel really special that that's your game being played by different people I would like to make games for people to buy them all over the world and so coding is at the heart of the the world in which they're going to exist they need to be taught skills for jobs that don't even exist today but what I don't want it to be is just another dry fourth science what they should be doing is having coursework assessed have their code assessed working cooperatively bringing Academia uh the school environment closer to the work environment something that's relevant and in context fun and something that through peer-to-peer learning there's so many creative ways of learning together in school that teachers shouldn't be afraid to have children teach them effectively they can be facilitators using the best online resources where it's code academy KH academy uh all the informal clubs over here like young rewi and co- Club there are amazing facilities to get kids excited games are a perfect example of of collaboration of two skills art uh and Science and it's not just about games architecture you need the visual Aesthetics so a building looks beautiful but you also need the mathematics to make sure it doesn't fall down and kill you so if you look around the whole world where it's designing a car or a plane you or a smartphone device it's that Fusion of Art and Science it's the steam agenda it's not the stem agenda so science technology engineering and math of course essential but you have to have art as part of that or a deep understanding so that people can collaborate computational thinking problem solving games based learning is going to be all part of having somebody has a a more deeper understanding of the problems that they need to solve in their real worlds for me an exam should if at all should not be this memory test you know question one for a computer science exam should not be who invented worldwide web frankly I couldn't care less I can Google that and find out that in a second it's where they can write some code show me your code and I can give you a job academics are wonderful people and all that I understand all that and we need them desperately but not everyone's going to be an academic you have to so for me the the the place where children learn has to be brought closer to the place where they're going to work so collaboration as Rob says it's not cheating it's how the real world works so let them learn together let them work together don't judge them in isolation cuz we're all different so it's about working together with our own resp was interested actually in going into the computer games industry eventually