My son was accepted at Digipen, Drexel, and Abertay for Game design. Curious if anyone has insight into choosing one over the other. Abertay would give him an interesting experience being in Scotland and it is the least expensive. Drexel is more of a traditional university with the co-op option which is great. Digipen is hugely impressive for Game Design but not a very traditional education. Thoughts?
Note that Digipen does not have regional accreditation.
Game design is also a rather narrow field aimed at jobs in an extremely volatile industry which also hires more ordinary CS majors for software work.
I’m not an expert in the particular subfield, but generally, I think a better path to game design is a CS major with a game design focus/concentration. If one does do a game design program, make sure it has significant CS coursework.
BostonMom: Congrats. Our daughter was also accepted into Drexel Game Design and we are likely attending. We chose Drexel due to the CoOp and it being a traditional university, My D didn’t want to go to an Art-type school as she wanted a broader group of students to associate with and we endorsed that approach because if she decides not to do Game Design, she would have to transfer to another school and some of the credits would not transfer.
Congrats to her! Solid reasoning, it makes Drexel very attractive compared to a lot of other schools.
True. However, Digipen is highly respected within the gaming community. My D is a software engineer who works on a gaming design team at Activision Blizzard. Blizzard has on more than one occasion flown her to Seattle to recruit at Digipen.
Having said that, I could not agree more with post #2. And ucbalumnus is correct that gaming companies also hire individuals with CS degrees but without necessarily having a gaming concentration. My D falls into that category. Although she’s involved in game design, her broad-based CS degree and well-rounded education at an LAC has served her well.
I work in game design myself at a large gaming company (Xbox). Digipen is highly respected within gaming; we have a lot of folks who come over to work from Digipen, especially in art.
However, I also agree with ucb and PengPhils. Game design is a really competitive field, and many (most?) of us have experience doing something else before coming here. It’s a career you should prepare a backup for. Going to a traditional university and majoring in CS (or the equivalent) would better prepare him for a wide range of jobs than Digipen, which is a technical school essentially. Most of the people we hire actually don’t have a gaming concentration or a game design degree at all.
However, I will say that I do know of a lot of people who work here and elsewhere in the gaming industry who come from Digipen! They are right around the corner from us and also not far from Bungie, Amazon Game Studios, Nintendo, 5th Cell, ArenaNet, Valve, and a bevy of other studios. We also host the Penny Arcade Expo every year, where all the big studios come out and there are opportunities to network too (plus other cons with some gaming presence). So there are lots of field trips (I give tours and career talks to Digipen students relatively often), opportunities to network, and potential places to intern!
Abertay has some statistics on their employment and salaries after graduation. https://unistats.ac.uk/subjects/employment/10007849FT-G450-U-CGADEV/ReturnTo/. It would appear that 6 months after graduation, only about two-thirds are actually in some kind of professional job, with 16% describing themselves as unemployed. Of those employed, it appears that just over half actually work as “Information technology and telecommunications professionals”, “Artistic, literary and media occupations”, or “media professions.”
Unsurprisingly, the students who majored in computer games technology (which seems to be the more programming heavy course, as opposed to computer games application development) have much more success, with 90% of them employed within 6 months of graduation and almost all of them employed in technology or telecoms.
Note that Drexel has 2 different ‘game design’ programs. One CS based and one Design based outcomes for each are probably different.