Task 23: Life Changing or Career Building?

It’s hard to know what to teach people with a course which has so many different aspects to it. 2D and 3D work has such a different skillset in my opinion. Most people also aren’t sure exactly what they want to go into or at least don’t know what is best for them. I think that is where educational institutions are actually better than learning everything for yourself.  A lot of people find it hard to keep focused on something that doesn’t have any instant reward. This is why they prefer doing things which they find fun and interesting. But this can be a distraction and they could end up preparing for a dream job that doesn’t exist. So having somewhere which focuses and forces you to look at the reality of the games industry and every aspect of it is a good thing. A student studying games art should have a much better idea of what they want to do and what is achievable. Probably more than someone who has tried to learn everything by themselves and concentrate on one thing like drawing. But when you have decided what you want to do and have overcome the technical limitations its only up to the person to develop their skills, which isn’t really possible to teach.

I think the problem is that game companies are probably half as clueless as everyone else when it comes down to the future, often companies could be unsure just how well they will do and what direction the game industry will go in. I think they only know what they want to see in someone’s work when they actually see it and how they got there is irrelevant.  Technical skills are important because if you don’t have them you can’t do the job. This is also similar with creativity, except people don’t need to be too creative if they can do their job, for example you wouldn’t need to be super creative if you haven’t got any control over the brief you have been set to work on.

My guess is that game companies are looking for people who are creative with a solid technical understanding and works fast. But how can you know the extent of someone’s creativity? A game company can’t hire someone and hope they prove to be as creative as they seemed in their portfolio. But they can hire someone who they know has all the necessary technical skills and will be able to do the work.

The size of the game companies and the difference in them varies so much it’s hard to generalize all their needs. A smaller company might find someone who is very useful in lots of different areas very useful and money saving. But bigger companies with massive teams might specifically want people to do exactly their own thing. Although i have heard of bigger companies who have very talented people using them to their full potential which might mean them working on more than one thing. They might also want more of an input from a person they value, which means they need to be creative and usually experienced. 

So when teaching games art, technical skills are vital and need to be up date with the current state of the games industry, but you can’t teach people how to be creative. You can give them different things to think about and a better understanding of things, but it’s up to them whether they listen or not. Some things you can learn from an educational institution which you might not even think of by yourself. I also think it’s good to be around people with similar goals and work with them on group projects, which is something you can’t do by yourself.