Communications - December 2009

focus on “tractable abstractions separate from real problems” 2 is no longer acceptable. In the conceptual age, we need to change the direction of the field or continue an unwelcome slide toward irrelevance.

Cognitive and Creative assets The conceptual age of technology is defined by cognitive and creative assets, with the design side being just as good. We see harbingers in recent business success. For example, Apple has done well with design-driven products enabled by great engineering. On the other hand, Microsoft is a great engineering company that deemphasizes design at its own peril; the Vista operating system, despite its technical success, was not built with user experience as its ultimate goal and had great difficulty with respect to adoption. Much of the rest of the traditional computing industry is shrinking, but the game industry is a segment that continues to grow due to its focus on design backed up by great supporting engineering. The demand for computer scientists capable of building games is high, with large companies like Electronic Arts reporting that 65% of their hiring demand is for programmers skilled in building games. Unfortunately, the kind of computer scientist required by the game industry is not exactly what

Components of a networked game.

traditional computer science departments produce.

The game industry wants graduates who are strong programmers and system developers, skilled in game design, and capable of and experienced in game development in large, cross-disciplinary collaborative teams. Some computer science departments produce graduates who are strong programmers and system developers, but most do not produce graduates skilled in game design. Moreover, most do not produce graduates facile in large, cross-disciplinary collaborative teams. The typical computer science graduate has little experience with team software development beyond one or two projects with three to five other computer science students.

Computer science departments can retool themselves to meet these challenges, but, for game development, doing so requires a strong, experienced champion and proper resources. Here, I discuss a particular approach we take at the University of Southern California, outcomes from that program, and questions with respect to transitioning a mature field toward the conceptual age.

Game Development and CS Education If computer science departments are indeed to make the transition, what

will they transition into? The game industry also wants graduates with a strong background in computer science. It does not want graduates with watered-down computer science degrees, but rather an enhanced set of skills. This is good news for the departments, meaning they can transition some courses to new material or new foci, create new courses, and still not abandon decades of hard-won knowledge. The best way to think about the transition to the conceptual age is to make the focus the “big idea or big concept,” with a follow-on focus on how to build the concept and with what technologies.

Strong programming skills is the first item on the list, meaning an undergraduate program’s first four computer science courses—CS- 101 Fundamentals of Computer Programming, CS- 102 Data Structures, CS- 105 Object Oriented Programming, and CS-201 Principles of Software Development—must be taught in a rigorous manner by excellent practicing programmers. While computer programming languages abound, and the historic computer science attitude “You learn one language, and it’s easy to pick up the next one” is not shared by industry. The game industry will also tell you that it wants the first four programming classes in C++, not Java, according to M.M. McGill4 and