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Critical skills for game developers: an analysis of skills sought by industry

Published: 03 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

With electronic gaming on the rise, several major universities involved in game development research have implemented curricula specifically for future game developers. Gaming curricula are now being offered in smaller universities, colleges, and other educational institutions, with other departments wondering if they should follow suit and what content should be covered. For this quantitative research, the author performed a content analysis on posted job advertisements for game developer positions, to determine qualities the gaming industry desires when seeking game developer employees,. A categorization of qualities was performed after reviewing each job ad and five categories for qualifications were developed: Experience, Education, Interpersonal & Personal Abilities, Technical Skills, and Supporting Knowledge and a frequency distribution of the qualities in each ad was performed. The results show that there are education and experience levels, skills, abilities, and knowledge that are clearly sought by industry and certain qualities are sought with more frequency than others.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Future Play '08: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share
November 2008
297 pages
ISBN:9781605582184
DOI:10.1145/1496984
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 November 2008

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Author Tags

  1. game concentration
  2. game curriculum
  3. game developer
  4. game education
  5. game industry
  6. required skills
  7. skills
  8. software developer

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FuturePlay08
FuturePlay08: FuturePlay 2008 Academic Games Conference
November 3 - 5, 2008
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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