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Should I drop out of college to make video games? [Solved]
Zirikki
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So here's the situation: I'm a freshman with a computer science major at a 4-year university. I want to make video games. It's 2 weeks into college, and I am bored to death. All the work here feels like irrelevant busy work. I want to make games. I don't need to know jack shit about third world culture. So I'm considering just dropping out and doing programming. I love the community and opportunities at the college, but I just can't put up with this irrelevant bullshit. So what I'm wondering is: is college really worth it? Is $40,000 of debt and a Bachelor's in CS really more valuable than 4 years of programming experience? I'm afraid of the uncertainty involved in dropping out, but I don't know if I can survive another 4 years of boredom.
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Let me repeat that.
You will not get a job "making" video games without a college degree.
You'll get a job testing games, for minimum wage. As competitive fields go, the game industry is at the extreme.
source: My brother is employed by Epic, doing level design work. They do. not. hire. anyone to do actual design work without a degree.
Nope
If so, first tell me this:
What games will you make?
What games have you made?
What is your game budget?
Who provides the cash?
How much will they sell for?
How will you reach your target audience?
Who is your target audience?
How big is your target audience?
What needs to be done to build the game?
Who will do the artwork?
Who will do the sound?
Who will do the coding?
Who will do the design?
Who will do the writing?
Who will do the testing?
Who will give you feedback?
What platforms will your game run on?
How will you release updates?
Who will make your games website?
Have you incorporated your game studio as a company?
What will differentiate your game(s) from competitors?
Are you able to work way more than 60 hours a week for little to no pay?
but they're listening to every word I say
Finish your goddamn degree. Hell, start your goddamn degree--you're two weeks into a four or five year experience, I hardly think you're qualified to judge an entire degree program without even getting past your gen ed requirements.
And as a sidenote, yes, you do need to know about third world culture and other social/cultural issues to function as an adult human being.
Freshman CS and even sophomore CS is going to be boring. It gets better as you get into the more interesting topics. But first you need to learn the foundations. Talk to your professors and see if they have any projects you could work on. Maybe you should start doing a project on your own.
#2: Jebus is correct. You should transfer to an engineering school if a liberal arts education is "irrelevant bullshit" to you.
#3: You might not even want to make games. Try it for a few months and see if it's actually something you enjoy. Working on mod teams is typically the best way to go about this, and happily enough for you programmers are one of the categories that is most desired. Alternatively you could make your own, smaller games, like a platformer or something. Being a video gamer coder is a lot like being a normal coder except you get paid less, so working on mods or making your own games is a great way to find out if you enjoy the process intrinsically. Also, like I mentioned before, it will get you hired.
So, to make some very short advice even shorter, this isn't about video games, it's about you not wanting a liberal arts education. Transfer to an engineering school and while you're busy figuring that out, make some games on the side, because nobody is going to stop you except yourself.
There's going to be "irrelevant bullshit" your entire life. You're going to need to get very used to it.
Telescopically focusing on coding makes for a life that is going to be less fulfilling than you might otherwise have, anyway. Do you think Deus Ex got made by people who only played Halo and read XKCD for fun?
edit: check out what MIT puts you through.
I think I've used my Intro To Social And Cultural Anthropology class in literally EVERY other class I've ever taken.
Knowing stuff about the world and about people and how things work on a level other than purely mechanical is vital to being able to create things for that world.
Do not drop out. Or... drop out so I will have less competition down the line. Up to you!
The reason I ask, is because from what you wrote, you really don't seem ready for college. And at the end of the day, college is not for everyone. Maybe take a semester or two off and try to program a game/figure out what you really want to do.
Also, I hope that you realize that not a lot of people actually get to make games ala Miyamoto, etc. Most just make a tiny little piece of the whole thing.
Maybe useful to yourself, but unless an employer sees that degree or you have some serious work to back yourself up, this is not advice to follow.
Except we have people in the gaming industry here saying that no, you need a degree to do anything. The film industry is very different from the gaming industry when it comes to educational background, and I say that as someone with contacts in both.
Investigate this:
http://igf.com/2011/01/2011_independent_games_festiva_12.html
It's very prestigious, and you have to be a student to enter. So make that game, because you'll never again have the free time you have at university. You need a demo game to get a real job programming games at a real company. You also need a degree to even get your resume read.
If you are bored, it means you are being lazy, and not improving your skills on your own time. You don't just go to university and get skills piped into your brain without you doing anything but turning up to class and doing the assignments. You need to make games and meet others who like making games - particularly those who can do what you can't (art, design, sound, whatever.) You also have access to professors who can help you with any tricky technical problems you run into while coding your masterpiece. They are usually very happy to help students working in their own time.
Also 2 weeks into the first term is hardly when they break out the challenging work. They are expecting you to still have difficulty operating the washer-dryer and figuring out how to get up in the morning without being nagged by your parents. So they are going easy on you.The interesting stuff comes later.
To do anything in gaming? Not really. Valve hires people based on mods they've made in tons of cases, and a few jobs on their jobs board does not list any required degree for being hired. And I'm not sure what your point was with this post after the first sentence.
Oh totally. You can get a job without a degree. You can also win the lottery. Turns out neither of those are successful life strategies.
But totally follow Halfhand's advice. All you need to do is make a killer mod that generates a ton of buzz. Should be easy with your high school education and your ability to stay motivated as evidenced by your two weeks of higher education.
My friend graduated Berkeley with a degree a year ago and still has no job from it. What does your high and mighty college triumphs all attitude say about that?
There are options outside of college. That was all I was saying.
That perhaps your friend who graduated from Berkeley didn't have a life plan post-graduation? Getting a degree doesn't guarantee you a career, it just makes getting one (provided you have life direction and motivation) a lot easier
Uh... that your friend should have planned ahead? That graduating doesn't guarantee anything but will make your life way easier then not getting a degree will? That he should have majored in something useful, or done something useful while getting a degree? That he lacks motivation beyond what it took to simply get a degree? That the economy and job market suck right now and there are a ton of people WITH degrees to hire?
What exactly is your advice going to generate? Another fry cook working the midnight shift at Waffle House? If your Berkley friend who HAS a degree can't get hired, what kind of chance do you think Joe-Fuckall without a degree has? You think there aren't a shit ton of computer science majors graduating who not only have a degree but also an impressive portfolio they built while GETTING that degree? You really think Valve isn't going to take that person over a high school graduate who really wants to make games but can't motivate himself to get through an intro history course?
Halfhand, unemployment is high. Being able to produce anecdotal evidence that somebody is unemployed doesn't mean college is a bad idea. If it's bad for a berkeley grad, it's going to be worse for everybody else. If you compare outcomes for people with and without college degrees, the college degree is worth about $1m. http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p23-210.pdf If you survey people here, I think you'll find that of the people lacking a higher education degree, some are self-made and would presumably be vocal about it, but most financially successful people have that degree.
H/A is littered with stories of people who have done college all wrong - i.e. they have lived, anxiety-ridden, friendless and depressed at their parents' house for 3 years and drove to some local commuter college and stayed awake playing video games until 3 AM each day and gotten C-s and Ds in all of their classes. Those people often have an anti-college attitude. I'm not sure if it's poor socialization that lead to failure, which prompted after-the-fact anti education rationalizations, or if the attitude was already there and lead to failure. Either way, being anti-education, and being blind to its benefits, is silly.
That doesn't mean one shouldn't make an honest assessment of why one is going to school. Too many people go without an idea of why they want to go, or a clear strategy of how they will make a living. To the extent their interests and abilities correlate to a career amenable to a liberal arts degree, that's fine. But if someone always hated school and discovered they wanted to be a plumber, they should have thought about things going in. I strongly recommend a gap year to at least start to think these things through.
That said, none of those concerns apply in the present case. Learning how to do better compsci at a university is a good idea. For one, it will give him exposure to many different compsci approaches and personalities. It should also give more perspective as to what kind of career he wants; working in the games industry sucks compared to many different other kinds of CS jobs, both in terms of working conditions and the intellectual challenges posed.
Seriously? Going to college is pretentious now? Are you fucking kidding me?
When you say that being successful without college is like winning the lottery, yeah. You sound like you were born yesterday.
And when you say you don't need a degree to get anywhere, which while technically correct is completely intellectually dishonest, and then proceed to just give genuinely shitty completely anecdotal advice, you sound completely ill-informed. Now granted, I don't know you, but I do know that your advice here is simply terrible.
When did I say you don't need a degree to get anywhere? You don't need a degree to succeed in Film, and you can possibly succeed in gaming without one. You need one in most other fields. And I never advised him to do anything, I just told him that people have gotten jobs at Valve through creating mods. Try being less of a fool, maybe then you can actually read what I wrote.
Can you provide a list of several people that have been hired for their moods and who don't have a degree in CS or a related field? You can't hold up the outlying exceptions as examples, man. Thats some sort of logical fallacy.
In film all you do is keeping making shitty little films over and over until you either get better or you don't, in which case you become a fucking rigger or something. It's not about theory, its about practice.