"It's like GTA, only with more stuff in it."

This follows on a bit from a previous update.

Now, as you might have read on the extensive bio to the right there, I'm a designer, so I'm looking at this purely from a design perspective - maybe things are very different in other disciplines - and I've interviewed a fair number of people (enough that I've forgotten how many it is, but let's say that two dozen would be a conservative guess).

Candidates who've been through 'game' degrees (design, programming, whatever) almost always have the weakest grasp of what modern games are doing, and what is reasonable.

The most memorable example was a wildly ambitious project that would need mountains of assets, that due to its branching structure most players would never see, and wrapped tightly around a single licensed IP. This particular candidate had achieved good results in their course, and actually received special reward for their design, despite it being suicide for any studio that decided to create it. Why are video game design courses, at the very least not educating people about the pitfalls and realities of professional development?

The answer is that they (the lecturers) don't realise that's what we (the developers) want people (the potential employees) to know.

Many development studios are trying to remedy this situation now by working more closely with the universities that offer these courses. Blitz Games now even hold annual open days to allow students to see what working in 'the trenches' is like.

So hopefully the situation will get better, not worse. And we did give that guy a job - he was talented enough, and we figured he'd soon learn the errors of his ways. Time will tell.