Game AI U?
I was catching up on the activity on this blog not long ago, and I read through the awesome thread that Adam started on Industry/Academic collaboration, and it occurred to me that I’ve never seen discussed here one of our industry’s biggest recent trends: the rise of the game schools – the Digipens, the Full Sails, the DeVrys. Even many of the standard 4-year schools are now offering full Game Design and Game Development degrees, or at the very least courses in these areas. Bungie had a recruiting booth at GDC this year – first time we’ve done it – and I think we were all surprised by the number of students coming out of such programs.
I was particularly surprised by the number of visitors we had who cited AI as their main focus of interest. The point was driven home at the AI programmers dinner when one of the Full Sail guys said something to me like “… and of course, everyone wants to do graphics or AI, those are the sexy fields…” Wow, really? When did THAT happen?
Well that’s pretty cool, and I think there are a lot of signs that point to the growing maturity of this academic niche.
I just have one worry: I talked to a lot of students at GDC who cited A*, steering behavior, neural nets, etc. as proof of their AI expertise, but I’m concerned this might point to a case of academic over-fitting. Those things are well and good, but they’re also relatively straightforward, in and of themselves, and very SPECIFIC. If I had to choose between someone with experience with those particular tools of the trade and someone else with a generally stronger math and CS background, I would always choose the latter. Of course no one says you can’t have both, and I’m sure that’s what the game schools are aiming for. And clearly, in the spirit of Adam’s thread, it’s also incumbent on us in the industry to continue to prod the game schools to teach what we need learned.
I would be interested in hearing about other peoples’ more direct relationships to this topic, whether grads who moved from a Game AI-oriented curriculum into the industry (do you think it prepared you appropriately?), industry people who’ve worked with some of those grads (do you see holes in the education they’re getting?), or maybe industry people who are now teaching. Steve Rabin, are you out there?
Post-script: my HIGHLY UNINFORMED IMPRESSION is that animation engineering is an area that is sadly neglected by the game curriculae right now (isn’t good AI is at least 75% good animation, after all?). Does anybody else get that feeling?