I'm actually going over my son's school game plan. Every once in a while I assess where he is (in a very nonofficial way) and think about where he should be, by my standards, and where he wants to be by the time he's 18 and ready to go to college.
Nick wants to be a video game designer. I'm not a huge video game fan, but I do enjoy the hidden objects and match 3 games I get from Big Fish Games. However, I can see the potential for a solid, happy career for Nick in this field and I'm happy to help him along this path.
Becoming a believer
For the most part, when your child says, "When I grow up, I want to be (fill in the blank)," you smile, nod and say, "That's great honey." That's because the fill-in-the-blank part changes nonstop for most kids.
However, Nick has been saying he wants to be a video game designer (and nothing else) since he was 7 years old. Well, there was a short time when he wanted to be an actor on the side, but video games have always been his first love.
Here we are almost six years later, and I have finally decided I believe him. It took me long enough. I think my hesitation was that I was afraid he thought designing video games meant just dreaming up ideas and then playing the games after someone else made them. His fascination and adoration of them led me to believe that what he really wanted to do was play them. (You thought I was going to say "direct" didn't you?)
Well, the more he said he wanted to be a video game designer, the more I thought I should look into what it really is. If this is really what he wants to do (or thinks he wants to do) then we should both know what it is exactly.
Who knew?
As it turns out, being a video game designer is EXACTLY what Nick thought it was. You dream up the ideas and let the tech people and artists work on it. OK, well, it's not that simple. The video game designer takes the lead, creating the direction the game will go in, and works with all who are working on the game to make sure it stays true to his idea or vision of what the game should be. In a nutshell, the video game designer directs. (There, I said it.)
Doing my research
So how did I find this out? Lots of Internet research and a little bit of ingenuity.
I decided to look at the colleges that teach game design to see if I could get any information from them. I found Full Sail University and read some of the interviews they had done with graduates. At the end of an interview with game designer Jameson Durall was his blog site. I went to the blog and read what he was doing. (By the way, if you click on the link to his blog, please note it is NOT intended for younger viewers.)
I then contacted him and asked him what suggestions he had for teaching my son in order to prepare him for the world of video game design. To my astonishment, he responded to me and quickly. He was very nice and supportive, and gave me great advice and the name of a book to get that would tell us all about the reality of video game design. I looked at that book (The Art of Game Design) on Amazon and several others in the "Customers who bought this item also bought" section and actually learned a lot just by reading the descriptions.
So what does this have to do with the education game plan?
Now I am re-evaluating the education plan. I've been following an unschooling game plan, with a little traditional schooling thrown in for good measure. My thought was that Nick needs to have the basics in everything (literature, science, history, math, art, vocabulary, etc.) but he also needs to take the lead in what he really wants to do as a career. So along with doing the basics he's also been studying Flash animation and 3-D animation. He'll be studying PhotoShop, Unity, Blender and other animation and game design programs along the way too.
How will I cram it all in? It dawned on me the other day when I was talking to a co-worker. I was talking about the legend of the phoenix (because I had to draw one) and she didn't know anything about it really. She knew it was a bird that caught fire and came back to life, but that was it.
It occurred to me that it wasn't really necessary for her to know all about it. She's a very intelligent woman and one I turn to quite often for details on how to do my job (to make life easier for all the other workers). I did not think she was unintelligent at all for not knowing the story.
That's when I realized, it is NOT necessary to teach Nick EVERYTHING. The goal of unschooling is to expose him to as much as possible and let him decide what he needs to know in order to reach his goals. Nick does NOT need to know calculus to enter the world of game design. (Geometry would be good though. I use it all the time as an artist. And a video game designer does work with artists.)
He does NOT need to read every piece of classic literature out there. I can expose him to quite a bit through summaries and Cliffs Notes. If he decides he wants to hear more, we can read more. I pointed out a video game we played was based on a classic novel (Phantom of the Opera) and he liked the video game enough to want to hear the story. But for the most part, just knowing the basic story is enough.
I make a point to mention when a video game references certain classic tales, or legends or historic events. I have told him many times that learning about a lot of things will give him many ideas for video games. And it's true. Some stories, either fictional works of art or actual events, make great material for video games. We see it time and again on Big Fish Games.
So I am able to pare down the material I was going to teach him by realizing not all of it is absolutely necessary. If there is a time in history he is not really concerned about, we'll cut those lessons short. If he wants to learn more about a specific art style, we'll concentrate more time on it. We're just going to play it by ear for the most part, but have a list on the side for me (because I'm a list maker and it'll make me feel better).
Most important skill to teach
Most important for all of us to know, however, is that whatever you want to know or need to know is available to you if you just do your research. It starts with a simple library or Google search and goes from there. I think that is probably the most important skill Nick needs in life and he's already got that mastered (doing video game research wouldn't you know).
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