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[theRayDog]

I'd say about 30% of my game development courses were actually useful. The other ones were useful because they required no work so I could pour the extra time into developing games on the side. The real value of school is paying to have 4 years where you're socially allowed to not have a job and sit on your computer all day. Take advantage of it and you will reap what you sew. Expect any school to teach you everything you need and you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.

If you're just thinking about it from a corporate perspective, then yes the CS major is more valuable. But then, why would you want to think about it from the perspective of a horrible monster like a corporation?

[PurpleCurse]

Well, it sounds like Computer Science is the smarter choice. Maybe sacrificing some enjoyment will be better for the long-term picture. 

Well, having attended two schools for CS, I'll say that the quality varies greatly depending on the school.

Some schools treat Computer Science as "the science of computers" and some treat it as "software engineering".  Personally, I'm of the camp that computer science as "the science of computers" is the way it should be done.  Software engineering is something that should be learned by doing, but learning the science portion is much better suited to the classroom portion.

I'd say learn computer science.  If you decide you don't want to make games, you'll have a degree that could get you a job in a different industry.  With the game degree, you'd be rather fucked.

That really sucks because I've had a co-op in an IT and I hated it.

I spent a year at one of those rip-off tech schools, a year at a "traditional" university, and now I'm wrapping up week two at DigiPen. I'd be willing to discuss the pros and cons of all of your options further, if you'd like.

 

That's pretty cool because DigiPen was one of the schools I was considering. What is it like?

[CowBoyDan]

In general, I think the most valuable thing about my "education" vs things I learned myself.... all the things I learned that I wasn't interested in learning, which.. later in my career.. seeemed to pop up.   Graduating college.. I had this notion that I hated databases they were dumb, and I didn't want to work with them.  My last job I worked with a database system will nearly a billion rows of data, big aix oracle boxes.  Job before that.. postgres, sqlserver and oracle.  (first job had no db stuff).  Current job.. most sql server.  Plug I dabble in some mysql for my own projects, relatively simple though.. high score table and such.

So.. dont take classes for things you want to learn, you'll learn that yourself anyway.  take classes you dont want to learn.

[Muz]

My superior did game development in college, and he's now highly paid and well in demand. Game developers are either:
1. Really hardworking people who take on the most difficult form of programming.
2. Really lazy people who just want to play games all day.

Maybe not true, but that's what the degree says.

I did electrical + telecommunications engineering. I got in with barely an interview, because science and engineering people have a very high performance record in the software industry. A psychologist who takes a software job gets this "oh, this guy can't get a good job" look. A lawyer or biochemist who takes a software job gets an "oh wow" look.

It really doesn't matter what you take. If you're here, chances are you've got a lot of practical software dev experience under your belt and are automatically worth as much as a guy who did a degree + a year's experience.

Just take something as difficult as you can manage, preferably a little relevant.

Of course, this assumes that a proper computing person will be reviewing your application. HR can be fucking stupid and will shortlist people based on how many programming languages you put on your cover letter.

[DavidCaruso]

CS major is probably better both from the perspective of actually learning useful things and the perspective of being able to get a job after college, or at least that was my reasoning when choosing this route. I don't think the university I go to (UMD College Park) even offers any game dev courses anyway, however there is a "Digital Cultures and Creativity" program that teaches you about Facebook and "creative digital expression" (and also gives you a free iPad and better dorm so I should have enrolled in it instead.)

[Zack Bell]

I spent a year at one of those rip-off tech schools, a year at a "traditional" university, and now I'm wrapping up week two at DigiPen. I'd be willing to discuss the pros and cons of all of your options further, if you'd like.

 

That's pretty cool because DigiPen was one of the schools I was considering. What is it like?

So far, DigiPen is pretty awesome. However, I think that some would say the list of pros is of equal length as the list of cons. This of course, depends on what type of person you are. The school is very difficult. I already have four to six classes worth of homework most nights and we're already forming teams that will be working on full-year game projects. I have class mon-fri, five of my eight classes are computer science related, and I'm loving all of it. The down side comes from the massive work load and possibly the social level of some of the people that you will have to work with. Again, this varies from person to person.

People who are more social end up hanging at the University of Washington which is about twelve minutes away.

[PythonBlue]

Is the uni education (especially the CS) so bad in the US? I thought that here in Czech Republic it would also be just a paper needed to get a job but I actually learned quite a lot of useful stuff in the first year (especially about how HW works - circuits -> logic gates -> automatons -> CPUs, or how OSes work - filesystems, scheduling, caching)...

Well, having attended two schools for CS, I'll say that the quality varies greatly depending on the school.

I certainly hope that the quality varies from college to college. I had originally applied to my university in the hopes of being a computer science major, since my university is so full of itself with classical and jazz despite the growing electronic music scene, but quickly dropped out of that major because of the faculty in that department being unwilling to help me out. Half of the full-time faculty literally couldn't even speak English!

[Graham-]

Something to think about:
  . CS degrees are more respected
  . they've been around longer
  . Game Design degrees haven't had as much time to mature

You can learn a lot about game design on your own, buying books, coming here, making games, reading blogs. But University can teach you how to learn. CS degrees have had more practice doing that.

[Rob Lach]

I did CS at UIUC. It's an excellent program. I wasn't taught programming, mostly theoretical stuff, which I think is the way to go. Programming is dreadful to learn through lectures or whatever, just dive in. That's what we were forced to do. We were given a task, sample output, and which programming language to use.

Game design is best learned making games, and you don't a formal education to do that.

[StrictlyDominant]

If you already know how to make your way around making games, then just go with programming and find out what the game degree people are learning and take a look for yourself. If you don't know your way around making games, I would still suggest choosing programming and researching game design on your own time and building a resume.

I just spent 3 months doing QA to build up my resume with about a dozen other people that just graduated with game degrees.  The only difference between them and me is that I can get a $25-30/hr programming job with my degrees to buy game assets and they will be struggling to pay rent.

[sigfarter]

Don't go to school, teach yourself at home. Self-taught players in either field will always be preferred over those who have a degree. A degree indicates that you are taking the half-hearted approach because many people are entirely capable of teaching themselves how to be competent in those fields. Don't forget that by earning a degree you will be saturated with debt for at least a decade. Basically going to school is retarded. Unfortunately the previous generation spouted off rhetoric about how you "have to get an education!" which is complete bullshit, and you probably aren't going to read any of this because you are just an unmotivated white trash sucker who spent his entire life playing video games, fuck I don't care do whatever you want.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

neither a cs degree or a game dev degree will make you a better game developer or a better programmer, however, a cs degree will at least allow you to get a job as a programmer in case you can't survive as an indie, so i'd say go with the cs degree, if you have to do a degree at all

for the record i majored in biochemistry, so take my advice with a grain of salt. my brother is majoring in cs though and from what i gather from his work they aren't actually teaching him anything useful. he's about to graduate this year, with a four-year degree in cs, and still hasn't programmed a single full-length program (i means something of more than 10,000 lines of code), so i kind of worry that he's not actually being taught programming

[sigfarter]

You don't learn how to program in computer science. In computer science they teach you how to build a computer out of rocks and other pointless shit. I'm entirely serious.

[Zack Bell]

You don't learn how to program in computer science. In computer science they teach you how to build a computer out of rocks and other pointless shit. I'm entirely serious.

This is completely fucking true.

[Wilson Saunders]

Knowing how a simple parser works helps when you are trying to learn a new programming language. Also knowing the principles of linear/quadratic growth helps during code optimization. This is stuff a proper CS degree will teach you, and it will make you a better programmer in the long run.

I am not sure what a Game Development program will teach you, so I can't really comment on it. Just be aware the people who make the decision to hire you may have no idea how hard game development is.

[sigfarter]

I am not sure what a Game Development program will teach you

You will end up with a prestigious job in the industry texturing the soles of a shoe in an EA sports game.

Based on a true story (not mine).

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

yeah i believe game dev classes tend to be more 'practical' but they tend to teach you stuff that you need to get a job in the industry, rather than stuff you need to make games as an indie. eva once told me that most game companies have a single guy just to model the guns in a fps game. he's the "gun guy". blizzard, in starcraft 2, even had a guy just to do the water, he was the "water guy". that's literally all he did, worked for 3 years on making the water look nice

honestly the absolute best degree if you want to go into indie game development would be to major in either marketing or business, or both (with an emphasis on guerrilla marketing and small business). those are the skills indies need the most

[AeornFlippout]

For what it's worth, I felt my time in University getting my CS degree was really valuable. There are so many little things you pick up along the way that you *don't* learn on the job, and it's a great opportunity to spend time learning to meet deadlines, to communicate better, and to be an altogether more rounded developer.

When it helped me land a job at a studio, I also felt like it gave me a leg up compared to some of the existing employees who had never been through some of these courses. When you can show somebody how to make their closest_point_on_spline() function 100x faster by using the Newton's Method you learned in your 4th year at college, people give you a bit more respect

I wouldn't trade that time for anything.

[crowe]

If you want to get a degree get a CS degree. It is the same as a Game Dev degree except that you don't come across like the idiot who decided to major in game dev rather than a real major. Maybe that's elitism or something but even if you think so it's still true. If you somehow don't get that dream job of being served coffee at valve while making half life 5000 one pixel at a time then you can fall back on an actual job with your CS degree.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

If you want to get a degree get a CS degree. It is the same as a Game Dev degree except that you don't come across like the idiot who decided to major in game dev rather than a real major.

Heh. That was pretty much my line of thinking when I went to school for programming. I imagined myself saying I have a BS in game dev, rolled my eyes and signed up for CST.

Honestly I'm just doing it so I can work abroad. If I wanted to live in north america all my life I probably wouldn't have bothered.