As a Teaching Assistant, you can be an invaluable asset to both your teacher, and your students. Picking up questions and solving problems to ease the workload on your teacher can help them provide a better education for the students, and generally make their teaching experience easier. Students benefit from having more than one person they can turn to for problem solving, and hearing multiple opinions on an issue has a better chance of helping them solve it. Specifically within the Game Design field, extra eyes on code can help spot issues that would have normally gone unnoticed, and due to visual design being so subjective, multiple opinions can provide more objective and useful criticism. Additionally, being a teaching assistant is greatly beneficial to the TA, and provides a unique educational opportunity. I greatly enjoyed being a teaching assistant, and I learned a lot about working with students, problem solving, and how to present myself as a role model to my fellow students. I would love to do this kind of thing again, and recommend it to anyone who is passionate about their pathway.
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This year with Mr. Bourgeois has been a blast. Working with students, helping Mr. B help them learn, running errands, and working on projects for him has been informational and fun. I've expanded upon my ability to teach students and help them through material, as well as increased my familiarity with the materials they're working on, such as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Unity. I've greatly benefited from being Mr. B's teaching assistant, and I believe that both the students and Mr. B have benefited from my work and effort.
This quarter as a teaching assistant has been fairly uneventful. Besides running the odd job, such as posting flyers in the hall ways or running an errand, I've mostly been left to work on my CTE Advanced Studies project. However, I did get to evaluate the work of other classes as they did board games, which was entertaining.
Here we are again, explaining what I did and didn't like about ECGC. Lets mix it up and start with what I didn't like. I was extremely disappointed with the Narrative Design track this year. On the second day, they only had 1 talk in which you could even attend, which was literally just going to be someone complaining about how being a Narrative Designer is difficult, which literally every other interaction with a Narrative Designer explains. Really, there is no need to make an entire talk about it. However, I did get to go to a talk that I feel really should've been in the Narrative Track, an Indie talk about empathy in games. It was interesting take on story telling in games, putting the feeling back into characters, making them human again, and making this an expectation from the industry as well. I got to speak with Renee Nejo, the person who gave the talk, and she had some interesting personal insight. I asked her about the morality of the gaming industry essentially making a profit purely off of emotional response rather then necessarily game play, in sue of her using the game "That Dragon, Cancer", a game about a cancer patient that would be more akin to something of an experience rather then a game. She responded, in short, by saying the people who make these kinds of games really aren't looking for money, and are rather looking to share their thoughts and emotions with the world abroad, and if the world abroad wishes to give them money for their efforts, then they would gladly take it. Her primary example of this was her own games, which are paid for through donations, rather then actually applying a fee to the game itself. This has really helped me further my own plans of working in this field. I feel that, I should take monetary risks to join teams like hers, ones based more on spreading a message and making an emotional game then making a profit. Or, at the very least, while working on monetary focused games, I should have projects going on the side that do tell the stories I want to tell. Because, really, at the end of the day, this isn't about the money. This isn't about making a perfect game that will get me famous and that everyone will love. This is about telling a story. Telling the stories I want to tell. Developing and creating stories I will want to tell. That'll be a lot of fun. Ain't going to make me a lot of money, but I'll make ends meet. As long as I get to tell my stories I think I'll be happy.
So far throughout this year, I think that the most widely useful skills in which I have acquired have been management based. Being able to maintain my own work ethic, as well as other's, will be an invaluable skill both in the gaming industry and beyond. I also think that changing the curriculum so that we get more of this experience, more actually working on games together and actually going through the process, would be a good way to better prepare students for next year, college, and whatever job they will pursue, within the game design field or not.
Over the past week, we worked on researching and creating info-graphics detailing the specific job we want to go into within Game Design. I've know for a long while now that my top picks have been Narrative Design and Game Writing, similar fields with similar jobs and skills necessary, with the only difference really being that Game Writers work more with the rest of the team to develop the game around the narrative trying to be told, thus requiring a very detailed knowledge of level design, programming, and at least some artistic and audio knowledge. The only thing I really learned from doing the research for this info-graphic has been the state of the Narrative Design field. And its good news, as its on the rise. For a long time, story has been on the back burner in the gaming industry, but new focus on story based games has opened a huge market for narrative designers, with only a few people to fill it. In addition, with my secondary focus as a programmer, I'll really be set to always have a job, even outside of this industry.
And so, another school year ends. Took it long enough. Anyways, these blog posts have been, surprisingly helpful. Its a useful tool to sit down after a week and just, look back at what we've done. Compile everything we've learned and done, and put it into a semi-coherent format. I'll probably either completely forget about this, not have anything happen worth writing about, or use it frequently. So, essentially, in response to "Are you going to use this over the summer" I'd respond with "Eh." In contrast to that mentality, its actually been really useful to me personally, as it really has been a time to sit down and essentially talk to myself about what happened last week. Its let me plan, let me learn about myself, let me organize my thoughts, and I'm probably not going to use it again till next year, so that's a real shame, real proud of my work ethic here. Anyways, looking forward to next year and all the migraines its going to bring.
As an individual interested in the career opportunities provided by the Game Design field, the most useful information I received this year was the ECGC trip, and the mountains of information imparted to me from several professionals in the field. It really helped me see exactly what is needed in this field and what I need to do to thrive in it. The most difficult information for me to understand was game history, simply from the dull presentation of it. I understand that its important information, but come on, it was a minor miracle that half the class didn't fall asleep during that presentation. Personally what I would change about the curriculum would be more focus on having kids decide what field of Game Design they want to go into. Let them explore it a bit more, and let them delve into the specifics of the field they choose a bit more.
Remembering this information was not that difficult. The majority of these questions could have been replaced with "Do you know what (insert job here) is/does?". The only thing I had difficulty remembering was the different document names, and when you send them to your employer. So, in preparation, I would review what some of the more specific jobs have to do, and what documents are sent when. Besides that, I'm good to go.
It was fairly difficult to remember the material after a year of not seeing it. I got a 77% on my first try, and got a 100% by the third or forth. I will need to spend time reviewing where the traditional games came from and the advancements that took place as they went along, as well as exactly when some of the newer advancements happened as well. Its been a year, the dates are a bit fuzzy, and I already have trouble remember dates without hundreds of days between seeing them. But, besides that, the majority of the material has stuck, which is good I suppose.
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AuthorI am 17 years old, and currently enrolled in Durham School of the Arts. Within the Game Design field, I'm looking to become a game writer or a programmer, preferably a combination of the two.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public School Archives
June 2018
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