At the 2019 Game Developers Conference I gave a talk at the Education Summit called “Are games art school? How to teach game development when there are no jobs”. The video of the talk is available on the GDC Vault but unfortunately you need a subscription to access it. So instead, here is a write-up of what I talked about.
There’s been a lot of discussion this past week about how universities should approach teaching videogame development and even just what the basic responsibility of game schools even is. This started with this Twitter thread by Danette Beatty from ustwo. Robert Yang wrote these good reflections in response about some of the challenges of teaching game development. Innes McKendrick wrote these good thoughts in a thread. I wrote this thread about how lacking a broad knowledge of game development disciplines is a problem in countries without large studios. Anna Anthropy wrote this good thread about balancing soft/hard skills in games education. The point across these responses: teaching game development is hard and educators and institutions alike are still trying to figure out how the heck you even do this while, at the same time, the global game industry is dramatically restructuring itself.
There’s one side of the discussion I haven’t really seen come up yet that I encountered first hand in the classroom: the fact that the overwhelming number of students who enter game development programs have no idea what the everyday work of game development actually entails. Worse, many of them have wrong ideas about what one does day-to-day to make games. I want to talk a bit about how this happens, how the marketing for game dev programs often exploit this ignorance, and how the responsibility typically falls on teachers to ensure these students know what they are actually getting in for. Continue reading
I want to get in the habit of writing semi-regular public updates about my current research. I feel like this is an important thing to do in part to help me work through my evolving ideas and in part because I’m using a large chunk of public money to do this research so some public reflection on it seems fair.
I mentioned previously in my general life update about the new project I’ve started. I’ve received funding through the Australia Research Council to undertake a three-year research project titled “Informal, Formal, Embedded: Australia Skill Developers and Skills Transfer“. The idea is to paint a more nuanced picture of what videogame development is, who does it, why they do it, and how it is contextualised within the broader Australian culture and economy. The focus on ‘skills’ is in part to get away from a focus on ‘jobs’. There are more people using ‘videogame development skillsets’ than there are people employed in ‘the videogame industry’. So focusing on skills and experiences is a way to draw that out.
I’m now about four months into the project. So far it has been a lot of project design, planning, and general administrative processes like sorting out ethics approval and budgeting. Most of that is pretty boring. Here’s some of the more interesting methodological/theoretical stuff that I’ve been working through: Continue reading
Brendan Keogh 
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