Richard Bartle, the father of the multi-user dungeon (MUD), recently spoke at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival:
MUD Co-Creator Bartle Criticizes Gaming And Academia Divide
He spoke on the divide between traditional universities and the modern universities – former polytechnics and institutes. He pointed out that out of 72 UK universities offering games courses in 2008, only 8 of them were universities in 1992.
“If you look at the subjects these 8 universities offer, they’re not really wholeheartedly behind games,” says Bartle. “They’re titles like computer graphics, vision and games, computer science with games technology… lots of ‘ands’ and ‘withs’ there.”
He cites several reasons for this divide:
“For one thing, they don’t consider games “academically respectable,” Bartle asserts. For another, computer games staff don’t get included in research assessment submissions, because there are no first-class journals specific to the medium — and, of course, major universities just don’t see any money in it, he says.”
Even with all of these newer universities graduating students, there are still too few graduates for this field:
“The problem is, these modern training houses are doing their jobs, producing plenty of adequately-trained would-be games professionals — “But because the older universities aren’t doing theirs, we’re getting too few educated people,” Bartle says.”
This is a very interesting article focusing on Bartle’s observations of today’s universities and their lack of focus on gaming. Jump to the full article for the rest of his observations.
