Jim Sterling / James "Stephanie" Sterling / James Stanton/Sexton & in memoriam TotalBiscuit (John Bain) - One Gaming Lolcow Thread

Did Jim go to college? Aside from Digi-Pen's churn and burn sounding like every other game design college I ever heard of, it seems like there's a major gap in Jim's world experience where he doesn't get that the sucky part of work exists and can't be entirely circumvented. Someone's blood oils those wheels. I don't think that professor mentioned should have a job, but academia is a very fucked up work environment, too. There are sociopaths in positions of power everywhere.

All that said, does anyone in Current Year need anything a school like DigiPen might offer than isn't available for free or pennies on the dollar? The time and money seems better spent on networking than a degree.
 
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Radical Goodspeed said:
Did Jim go to college? Aside from Digi-Pen's churn and burn sounding like every other game design college I ever heard of, it seems like there's a major gap in Jim's world experience where he doesn't get that the sucky part of work exists and can't be entirely circumvented. Someone's blood oils those wheels. I don't think that professor mentioned should have a job, but academia is a very fucked up work environment, too. There are sociopaths in positions of power everywhere.

All that said, does anyone in Current Year need anything a school like DigiPen might offer than isn't available for free or pennies on the dollar? The time and money seems better spent on networking than a degree.
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I think it's fair to say Jimbo falls into the "bad things can be prevented, so there's no excuse ever" line of thinking these days. And I do want to emphasize "these days" - once upon a time, Jim did have to live in the real world instead of his sex-and-drug-filled void of a house, and was able to understand concepts that didn't strictly apply to him.

Crunch, in theory, could be reduced if the bottom line was allowed to just be profitable instead of maximized, but sadly that's very unlikely to happen.

Oh, and no - not really. There are online courses that can teach you how to use pre-existing engines, and there are 3D indie devs who learn to build their own. You can very well make it in the games industry without going to one of these colleges that teach you how to be a good little cog. It won't be easy, but "entertainment: is never an easy job for anyone who has to actually help hold it up.
 
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Just_a_Bored_Guy said:
Today, something about a college that encourages programmers to accept crunch.
Well, if it's so highly regarded, how come I've never heard of it?
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I listen to this and have to wonder: Fat James has not actually been to university or college, has he? Because this just sounds like an average sciences program
 
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lmao, DigiPen is such an obscure target, especially when he promoted it like he broke some real news and did real investigation about an actual gaming institution

DigiPen has gaming clout because it's in Redmond, same as Nintendo and Microsoft, and both companies have hired from it in the past. Nintendo literally is the one that set the school up in Redmond and it used to be housed in the same building as NST. It was extensively covered by Nintendo Power (Nintendo's in-house magazine) and this got it into other magazines like GamePro. That's it. That's the only reason anyone has ever heard of it.

Well, okay, there was another reason. Back in 1990's there weren't any other schools like this! Now ever major university has programs like DigiPen does. It's been surpassed, it's not a leader in its field and hasn't been for like two decades. It's survived because it's a for-profit private university with some connections but it's hardly anything like a feeder school for the industry. I'm pretty sure its overseas schools (especially the one in Singapore) do far more of its modern business than the Redmond branch.

He's not uncovering some scandal or anything. Instead he looked at a low tier private university and found out that, shocker, it has a low graduation rate? That its staff are realistic about its students potential in the market? That it actually teaches useful skills? I'm not sure I even understand what he purports to have found.
 
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AirdropShitposts said:
lmao, DigiPen is such an obscure target, especially when he promoted it like he broke some real news and did real investigation about an actual gaming institution

DigiPen has gaming clout because it's in Redmond, same as Nintendo and Microsoft, and both companies have hired from it in the past. Nintendo literally is the one that set the school up in Redmond and it used to be housed in the same building as NST. It was extensively covered by Nintendo Power (Nintendo's in-house magazine) and this got it into other magazines like GamePro. That's it. That's the only reason anyone has ever heard of it.

Well, okay, there was another reason. Back in 1990's there weren't any other schools like this! Now ever major university has programs like DigiPen does. It's been surpassed, it's not a leader in its field and hasn't been for like two decades. It's survived because it's a for-profit private university with some connections but it's hardly anything like a feeder school for the industry. I'm pretty sure its overseas schools (especially the one in Singapore) do far more of its modern business than the Redmond branch.

He's not uncovering some scandal or anything. Instead he looked at a low tier private university and found out that, shocker, it has a low graduation rate? That its staff are realistic about its students potential in the market? That it actually teaches useful skills? I'm not sure I even understand what he purports to have found.
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No don't you get it? Crunch bad!
 
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Millennium Rooster said:
7:10 - Talks about the high dropout rate and how the university was proud of it
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Oh look something else Jim doesn't understand so automatically assumes it must be bad.

It's extremely common for STEM fields to have a high dropout rate because they're specifically designed to cut dead weight, unlike joke degrees like Gender Studies or Social Sciences which will bend over backwards to keep students enrolled because those courses exist purely to wring as much money out of students (or more likely their parents) as possible every semester.

TL;DR It's not a bug, it's a feature.
 
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Oliver Onions said:
Oh look something else Jim doesn't understand so automatically assumes it must be bad.

It's extremely common for STEM fields to have a high dropout rate because they're specifically designed to cut dead weight, unlike joke degrees like Gender Studies or Social Sciences which will bend over backwards to keep students enrolled because those courses exist purely to wring as much money out of students (or more likely their parents) as possible every semester.

TL;DR It's not a bug, it's a feature.
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And the professors are not shy about dispensing objectively correct advice like "if you are having trouble learning C, you should be in a different program". Fucking people who think working in video games is spending all day playing Mario and Pokemon as opposed to spending all day optimizing code to be slightly faster on outdated hardware are the problem here, and also fat genderblobs who have no idea what learning math beyond high school is like

Oh my god! A professor poorly defined a term paper's requirements! Why I never!
 
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The Fatriarchy said:
People who think high graduation numbers are good are the ones pushing people out into the world with lowered standards to begin with.
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It's partly the fault of everyone getting pushed into universities. Making universities a near universal requirement was a complete mistake and has left people with no real alternatives if they're not the sort of person suited for university intensity, so you get people freaking out about degree courses with high drop off rates when they have no alternatives. Of course that isn't the courses fault, it's the fault of the dumb university pushing culture.
 
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Oliver Onions said:
Oh look something else Jim doesn't understand so automatically assumes it must be bad.

It's extremely common for STEM fields to have a high dropout rate because they're specifically designed to cut dead weight, unlike joke degrees like Gender Studies or Social Sciences which will bend over backwards to keep students enrolled because those courses exist purely to wring as much money out of students (or more likely their parents) as possible every semester.

TL;DR It's not a bug, it's a feature.
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True story; when I went for a degree in programming, the course had about 45/50 students. After the first month, that dropped to 8, and 100% of the people you asked why they dropped it would respond "I didn't think it'd be that hard".

So many people take programming because they think it's as easy as slapping a keyboard for 8 hours to make Facebook.
 
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Video is unavailable, but I want to powerlevel about Digipen and other "game design" universities.
Source: Me, who never went to one of these places, but knew people who did. Back in my day, Digipen was known as "the place the Portal guys came from" and was seen as a golden ticket to that level of fame.

In my experience, people would go to Digipen, get a degree, then get a minimum wage job while they wait for Valve to call them. As far as I know they are still waiting for that phone call.

Hearing that Digipen has a high drop out rate surprises me because the British equivalent (within commute distance of me) turned out to be what American's call a diploma mill. Graduates scoff at the idea of using tools that are not "industry standard", which at the time was C++, Unreal 3, and 3DSMax or Maya.

Digipen having a high dropout rate implies one of two things. Either they have some measure of quality, or the standard of students has dropped so dramatically that they go in expecting to make TWINE games and walking simulators from store bought assets.

Digipen seems like a random topic for Jim to cover. Did one of his friends drop out?
 
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Dumpster dived waifu said:
True story; when I went for a degree in programming, the course had about 45/50 students. After the first month, that dropped to 8, and 100% of the people you asked why they dropped it would respond "I didn't think it'd be that hard".

So many people take programming because they think it's as easy as slapping a keyboard for 8 hours to make Facebook.
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We had about a 50% dropout rate in my class. Of course, this was civil engineering and not programming/games development so not one was expecting it to be easy, but a lot of people found out they just didn't have the right type of autism for it. Thankfully with a few exceptions STEM is still very much a "keep up or get out" club, since mistakes can easily get people killed.

Meanwhile, gender studies degrees indirectly get people killed all the time but they suffer no liability for it.
 
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Judge Dredd said:
Video is unavailable...
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Huh? Oh, here's the problem.
sterling u.PNG
 
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