A Master's In CS or a Master's In Game Programming?

Rustcycle asks: "I'm attending the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, which has just announced that they are offering a Master's Degree in their Games and Media Integration (GMI) program. There is a fair amount of overlap between the GMI curriculum and the CS courses, so I'm considering a switch in degrees. If you were hiring MS grads outside the game industry for visualization work, am I worth more to you with the more specialized program or would you be more interested in me if I had more exposure? Within the gaming industry, how much does a specialized degree compel a company to hire a recent grad?"

Get the CS degree

[daVinci1980]

As someone who's worked in games and in game related industries, I'll tell you that the 'Games' degrees are largely laughed at by those of us in the industry.

Good fundamentals are what I care about. I can teach you the domain specific knowledge you need to know, but if you don't have the fundamentals you'll never be good enough for me to bother with.

Good luck!

I say stick with the CS

[LiquidCoooled]

Forget a specialist restrictive subset of development, keep your options open for the future.
However, find a group of buddies and sit down as a team and code up your own games.

Have fun.

Do Not!

[Kamineko]

Do not get the games degree. Stick with CS. It's worth something.

Please.

Re:I say stick with the CS

[JNighthawk]

I disagree with you saying that it's a restrictive subset of development. The best analogy I read before was "Game programmers are to surgeons what normal programmers are to physicians. Surgeons can do everything the physicians can, and surgery on top of that." My education at Full Sail not only taught me programming, math, and the development life cycle, but we also had *two* actual game projects to work on. The most current project I worked on at Full Sail is Ultimate Fairy Battle, which is competing in the 2007 IGF Student Showcase.

Go for a regular CS degree...

[__aaclcg7560]

The fact of life in the video game industry is that once you been in the industry for 10 years and/or over 30 years old, you're no good to the cheap bean counters who run a lot of these game companies. Once you're out of the industry, you're need to get a REAL JOB (TM)! Get a regular CS degree and take any game-related classes you might be interested on the side. The key thing outside of school is always keep learning new stuff, have an exit strategy to get into the next job, manage your career that benefits your situation the best and stay healthy.

Re:Get the CS degree

[adisakp]

I also work in the games industry and here are the degrees which are probably most useful to you if you want a job programming games:

Bachelor of Science: Computer Science
Bachelor of Science: Mathematics
Bachelor of Engineering: Electrical Engineering (computer or digital design emphasis)

They're certainly not the only degrees to get but they do stand out on a resume as someone likely to be able to handle game programming. Those "BA:Film Appreciation" resumes with "I wanna kode a gr8 game idea I had" go straight into the trash.

Also very important is experience -- any experience. For guys who have never worked on a commercial game, being able to show demos of personal or even class projects covering aspects of game programming on graphics, sound programming, networking, etc will vastly improve your hireability as a beginning game programmer (not to mention probably get you a better starting salary). Being able to describe in depth some of the techniques will get you pretty far on an interview.

Now what's interesting is that while the Game Programming degree will get you some of the experience and prossibly a cool demo, there is still a stigma that the Game Programming degree covers mainly some practical applications and doesn't cover enough theory to allow you to delve into solving new and more complex issues outside of the learned practical applications. Therefore, your best bet is to take one of the tradition degrees and if possible AS ELECTIVES take classes from the Game Programming track.

Probably the CS degree.

[John Carmack]

Game programs have been somewhat useful for finding employees, but we don't actually think that the students are learning particularly valuable skills in the programs.

A CS or EE degree will almost certainly serve you better throughout your life than a game/media degree, but if getting into the industry immediately is your overriding concern, a game program will help with contacts and opportunities.

Exceptional merit will eventually be noticed (perhaps not as quickly as you would like, though), and a degree of any sort is not required if you can conclusively demonstrate that you will contribute great value to a company. However, many entry level positions are filled based on people's opinions about potential, and honest assessments from faculty that work with lots of students does carry some weight.

The best advice is "be amazing", but "diligent and experienced" counts for quite a bit.

John Carmack

Get the CS Masters and Forget the Gaming Degree

[Cappadonna]

Gaming Degrees is where most online degrees were 5 or 10 years ago -- they're not taken to seriously in industry and they somewhat limit your options. Looking at the syllabus and the school, it appears to be a new direction for a decent third tier E-school. However, you're going to have a difficult time moving into another industry beyond general tech support -- simply b/c some HR bean counter isn't going to know WTF your degree with mean.

If you decide to leave Gaming and go into other forms of IT, that Degree won't have the same traction as a Comp Sci or Math degree. ITOH, you can get the CS Masters, focus your research or thesis on gaming and still get your dream job.

- Cappa

Re; Get the CS degree

[Scrithy]

I'd say definitely go for CS, but as a game programmer that has been in the industry for over 14 years I'd say #1 on the list would actually be: Bachelor of Arts: Computer Science More math courses, less "engineering" courses. At least that's how I remember it when I was in school (getting a BA in CS, of course).

Nah. The games program at Colorado is in beta

[Animats]

The original article has a link to the "games program" at Colorado State. This is just a proposal within the school, not an established program. In other words, it's a pre-release beta. In fact, it's not really a "games program", it's really just a list of existing courses being repackaged as a "games program"

There are some well-respected games programming degrees [digipen.edu] but this isn't one of them. Maybe in a few years.

One thing I can say, as the person who first made ragdoll physics work - if you want to work at that level, you need math. Far more math than most CS majors. Not just the ordinary math for graphics, but the math for dynamics, control, and modern AI as well. Nonlinear differential equations. Computational geometry. Linear and nonlinear control theory. Classifier systems. Bayesian statistics.

On the programming side, you need to understand things down to the bit level. You're liable to have to do something awful like make a computational algorithm work on a GPU that's all wrong for the job.

If you're not good at heavy math, you'll be shunted off into maintaining the level editor or similar low-level programming work. For which the hours and pay are both lousy. Too many low-level programmers want to get into the game industry.

It also helps to have some artistic talent. You won't be doing the real artwork, but you need to be able to sketch, just to talk intelligently to the artists.

Re:More math?

[Longtime_Lurker_Aces]

From my experience and everything I've read, I'd say you must have just gone to a poor school for computer science, Horn. I've never heard of a CS degree out of the college of business (My school offers a "Management Information Systems" out of biz which is what CS dropouts major in) but I would agree its probably a joke.

My school has CS in college of liberal arts & sciences and CprE in engineering, we have a lot of classes in common between the majors and there is really no difference in difficulty between the two, and majors from both programs tend to get high paying jobs right out of college.

The difference here is that CS does theory and advanced topics while CprE does hardware and low-level (assembly, embedded systems, etc). Neither is "better" or "harder" its just a different focus, with about 50-60% classes in common.

Re:Get the CS degree

[nwbvt]

Yes, thats true if you are looking for a job within the gaming industry. But he was asking about jobs outside the game industry and in that case, you absolutely do not want a degree that just says "I got into this field because I like video games, and I'm going to leave your boring company as soon as I get an offer from EA".

Re:Get the CS degree

[Anonymous Coward]

Though I don't have a CS or Game development degree I do know that if you live in California, there is a recruiting company I know of called Wired Talent that specializes in finding talent for gaming companies large and small. I know they work with Sony and EA and they are located N. California.

Re:Get the CS degree

[protohiro1]

I say don't do it. The game industry pays less and works you harder. The fact that everyone wants in makes it pretty exploitive. (read the stories of life at EA). I tried for a while, gave up and now I am a web monkey, which pays well, is really fun and I can always just play games. And the fact is that people don't shred my resume or tell me I need to take work for free or grovel or whatever to get in. The big companies (google, yahoo et al) are begging for more people. My team has four openings we can't fill. A competent c++/java program would make $80k+ and work (gasp) 40 hour weeks doing pretty fun stuff. If everyone wants in you are going to get screwed. Just my opinion.