Erick Wujcik at a Detroit Elementary School

[Erick Wujcik]

Greetings!

The Palladium Open House wasn't the only place where I gave a presentation during my trip to Michigan.

I also went to my old school, McKenny Elementary School, in Detroit, and gave a talk to the 5th and 6th graders. Here's a website with pictures:

http://www.47rpg.com/DET/McK00.html

Keep your eyes peeled, and you'll see that I managed to scam donations of a couple of cases of The Rifter from Palladium Books (Thanks Kev!), so all the kids also had a take-away.

Also, I thought you guys also might like to hear about the main points in my presentation:

1.   Introduction. Talking a bit about myself and a few of my games (I was Game Design Studio Manager in Shanghai, working on Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and the kids just erupted when they say the image of that box).

2.   Progress in Games and Moore's Law. It worked well, but I move it later in the presentation next time.

3.   Game Teams and Specialties. I showed them pictures of the leads on Splinter Cell, and how many people it took to make the game.

4.   What is a Game Designer? I gave this as a short talk many times in China and Hong Kong. I show photographs of children playing with a ball, a piano and art, and explain that to be good at any of these things you have to practice every day... singing, art, piano, drawing, basketball... and that it's the same for games. To be a game designer, you just have to play games, write about games, and make up games everyday.

5.   DELETED. If they were older, I would have done a section on do-it-yourself interactive fiction games.

6.   Final Advice: My four (4) steps:

   a.   Be Disciplined. Get a game notebook and write in it every day. Write about every game you play, every idea you have, as well as your dreams.
   b.   Make Games. Throw together old board games, card games, street games, and make your own games.
   c.   Play Your Games. It's not enough to just have ideas, or to even write them down. You've got to try them out on other people!
   d.   Be Brave. It's okay to make bad games, to fail, to do things that don't work out. The more failures you have, the more you learn.

7.   Question & Answer Session.

You'll find more links about the whole thing on the last of the webpages.

Enjoy!

Erick

[arminius]

That's very interesting, Erick. Something that concerns me, though, is my impression that Nicole Bradford's rant is framed in terms of encouraging kids to realize a dream of becoming game developers, and that by pursuing this dream, they'll also pick up skills that will be useful if they do something else. But I'm really wondering how many kids, ultimately, will be able to make a career of game development. It's certainly a more realizable dream than becoming a singer or sports star, granted. I just think it would be best if "game designer" were presented as part of a spectrum of rewarding high-tech careers--the idea being to focus on the opportunities that skills will provide, instead of aiming for a single career path that may lead to frustration. (I'm talking economic viability here: no matter how good the kids are, competition between them means they can't all become game developers.)

Where I think the game design focus could be immediately useful would be if it were incorporated into curricula--have kids spend a semester or a year designing & developing games, in coordination with all their other classes (art, writing, computers, math, maybe science & history, too). In short the motivation provided by the interest in game design could be harnessed immediately toward encouraging skill development, instead of held out as a long-term dream.

Perhaps such a curriculum could be financed by grants from the high-tech industry. Right now I think that high-tech takes advantage of the cream of the crop from foreign public schools systems, which makes up for US neglect of its own public schools; pointing this out through PR along with evidence of the receptiveness of kids to learning through games might help move some money.