What do you say to the critics who think teaching computer game development to college students is absurd?
I’d tell them this: As far as the serious level of game development, the concentration has two main objectives. First: Programming a computer game from scratch is one of the hardest programming tasks. You not only have to program a vast array of features to support the content (3D graphics, sounds, story elements, etc.) but you must also ensure that everything you design is fast and efficient. Games must run at a steady 60 frames per second, which means all of the game calculations for rendering graphics, updating world elements as well as the physic’s calculations must be done within a 1/60 of a second. This is a tremendous undertaking – one that challenges students to rethink how everything is done so that all the elements run smoothly. The second benefit of teaching computer game development is that it is a wonderful vehicle for getting the above concepts across. Students would work on many of the same kinds of problems if they were programming their operating system (indeed, that t
