If you want to make games, don't do a game-design degree

In the Technology section from today's Guardian, Aleks Krotoski discusses the current trend for British Universities to run game designing degree courses. The industry has been encouraging Universities to run these courses, based on the reasonable logic that if graduates are trained how to make games before they start work, development times will be much shorter. Aleks asks whether this degree program is detracting from the spirit of creativity in the games industry.

It's true that the technical aspect of games development lends itself to a classroom environment, but do game design courses teach students the essential creative element of game creation? Aleks reasons that other courses not directly related to games (she suggests History, creative writing or philosophy as alternate courses) may give graduates the inspiration required to move the games industry away from "hackneyed paradigms and established genres". The last thing the games industry needs is an endless cycle of mainstream games made by gamers, for gamers. A narrow model such as this leaves little room for innovation.