An additional bit of "correlation != causation": I suspect that this may be pure correlation based on *passion* more than anything else.
Consider -- one thing I've noticed (the hard way) is that the game industry demands and rewards enormous passion for the business. To be successful, you have to be rather driven.
Now think about how that correlates with a degree. The people with the most drive to *win* in this industry and precisely the ones most likely to pursue it *instead* of a degree. The ones who pause to get the degree, on the flip side, are less likely to be quite as driven.
So this suggests that there isn't necessarily a causal relationship in either direction. Instead, both phenomena might be caused by the degree of passion to be in games *now*.
It's also worth noting that a degree matters even less in games than in most software, precisely because the programming is more challenging and up-to-the-minute. While the theoretical grounding is useful, it's *much* more important to be a technical self-starter with a love for self-education. The stuff I learned in college was at best marginally useful at LG, because the field had moved way on since then. Even for a recent graduate, I would expect this to be true: academic programs tend to be a little behind the times, and you pretty much have to be on the bleeding edge to be a good game programmer...
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Date: 2009-04-13 07:39 pm (UTC)Consider -- one thing I've noticed (the hard way) is that the game industry demands and rewards enormous passion for the business. To be successful, you have to be rather driven.
Now think about how that correlates with a degree. The people with the most drive to *win* in this industry and precisely the ones most likely to pursue it *instead* of a degree. The ones who pause to get the degree, on the flip side, are less likely to be quite as driven.
So this suggests that there isn't necessarily a causal relationship in either direction. Instead, both phenomena might be caused by the degree of passion to be in games *now*.
It's also worth noting that a degree matters even less in games than in most software, precisely because the programming is more challenging and up-to-the-minute. While the theoretical grounding is useful, it's *much* more important to be a technical self-starter with a love for self-education. The stuff I learned in college was at best marginally useful at LG, because the field had moved way on since then. Even for a recent graduate, I would expect this to be true: academic programs tend to be a little behind the times, and you pretty much have to be on the bleeding edge to be a good game programmer...