Advice for Students

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First, you must make a major career decision: training or education? Training gives you specific skills that you can use to get a job straight out of school. Education gives you broader skills that won't have immediate application, but will in the long run serve you better. It's basically a choice between a quickie approach and a strategic approach. If you're in too much of a hurry to plan strategically, then go ahead and attend a school where they'll teach you the details of handling the latest, greatest computer technology. Energy, not patience, is the strength of youth, so I can understand if you just can't stomach the thought of not plunging straight into your avocation. When I was your age, I too was impatient with all the irrelevant courses that the University forced upon me; now I blush at my impertinence and thank those teachers who pushed me so hard.

The quickie route will indeed yield faster results. If you attend a school that is dedicated to game design, or major in computer games at a decent college or university, you'll likely learn many of the details of present-day game design. You have a good chance of landing a job right out of school at an actual games company, working on games before you're 23.

But hold on here, hotshot. There's a difference between working on games and designing games. That first job you land will surely be the gruntiest of grunt jobs. You'll be assigned to some tiny task, like animating a minor character in the game who does nothing but walk across the background, or writing the code that asks, "Are you sure?" when the user decides to quit the game. If you do a good job with that, after a few years you might get promoted to handling more complex animation, or writing a more important piece of code. And after a few more years, you might even get promoted to a position where you're handling some pretty serious work.

But don't count on it. The basic problem is that there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of students just like you who are bursting with eagerness to become part of the computer games industry. Think in terms of supply, demand, and price. When the supply of workers is ten or a hundred times greater than the demand for workers, the price goes way down.

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