The today additional induction was a really appreciated thing. Meet one more time before the course gets under way. Simply brilliant. And the explanations we had were nothing less.
A good hour spent keeping everybody calm about the difficulty of the teachings and adding information about the topics: PS3 programming, differences with the XNA suite, a brief look at what has been done in the past and to what we are expected to do this year.
I'm totally excited about the opportunity I grabbed and I really look forward to next week lectures, as I look forward to all the awesome thing this course is going to teach me, since the initial fear about my multiple lacks of heavy programming have been taken away for the moment.
But (and don't tell me you weren't expecting a 'but' somewhere in this post) something is not completely clear to me.
During our meeting the lecturer told us that games are nothing but streams of data conveyed in a certain way by a little set of instructions. He didn't mention, or I didn't get it, that games are most of all an artistic work obtained with a deep creative interaction between software house members. I know, we are not supposed to know this and we are (will be, maybe) basically programmers, but I think it is not fair that if someone of us has a different approach to the video-gaming industry he has to throw it away in the rubbish.
That's why this blog was born. To make my philosophical thoughts float above or under or in between this vital data streams, without denying them.
I'm absolutely not complaining and I'm more than ever convinced about my choice. I just want to make sure all this numbers, all this instructions, all this programming don't drain energy from my will to face the amusement dynamics and explore gaming solutions.
I'm happy to be a little “different”. Nobody ever says the word Nintendo when I speak with my peers, and I think that it is almost obvious since the course is intended to be a way to get into the high-programming positions, something not hugely required in Nintendo or other developers who privileges creativity over graphics or technological machine level solutions.
Maybe at the end of this academic year I'll be a decent programmer and an awesome video games reviewer, or perhaps the opposite or neither things. One thing is sure: I'll be playing my games, I'll be heavily interacting with game designers or graphic artists colleagues.
Leaving the room at the end of our today session, the lecturer told us: “Play games!”. To me, it sounds like a contradiction with what he said in the previous 59 minutes. I hope, in a 365 day time, not to contradict myself.
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