Ready at Dawn Chief Executive Wants More Colleges to Prepare Students for Game Related Jobs

Speaking with VentureBeat, Ready At Dawn Studios’ Chief Executive and Creative Director Ru Weerasuriya discussed how he would like to see more colleges and universities preparing more students for jobs in the gaming world.

During the recent DICE Summit, Weerasuriya talked about how many colleges do not accurately prepare students for jobs in the gaming industry. He explained later to VentureBeat what exactly he meant by that, and what basic changes in the curriculums he would like to see.

Some schools are doing it right, but the reality of education right now on the gaming side seems like it’s very weak, weakly structured. I see a lot of guys starting out, getting out of school, who aren’t ready for jobs. They lack the foundations of traditional art. You need that in so many disciplines.

Right now so many schools are just saying, “You should specialize. Specialize as much as you can.” So they specialize and then they come here to work and you have these guys who are good at one thing they can do, but they need to be supervised 24/7 because you can’t just allow them the freedom to do whatever they want. They don’t have the tools to use that freedom. There’s a disconnect between education for games and what we need from graduates.

He mentioned that around 120 people work at Ready At Dawn Studios, but did not mention if those employees were hire right out of college or if they already had proper training. He did, however, note that they all worked on The Order: 1886 for about four years, and learned a lot of things in the process, such as how to create better “gameplay mechanics, navigation.”

What do you think of Weerasuriya’s assertions? Do you believe schools should teach more game development skills?

{Source: VentureBeat]

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