Skillset Blog

In an interesting thinkpiece on the BBC, Bill Thompson puts out a call for more people to engage with programmers, citing the proliferation of complex PC’s and software as one of the reasons behind a decline in the numbers of people creating new and innovative software.

It’s true that in the modern creative industries, there are very few forms of expression that do not require engagement with software of some kind. The sectors we cover are hugely reliant on the tools provided for editing, animating, modelling and so forth, but increasingly it seems people are becoming proficient at utilising computers without really learning what makes them tick.

Thompson says:

We may live in this world, but by and large we are merely users of the systems provided, pressing buttons and keys in response to prompts, using ‘creativity’ tools that constrain our invention, and putting up with failures, disappointments and crashes.

I hear this a lot, obviously, from employers in the games and animation sector. Programming skills are not taught anywhere near as much as they used to, ICT classes teach people to use computers, but not how they work, or how you can create your own applications for them.

In Higher Education, less people are applying to Computer Science courses, previously the lifeblood of the games industry (games courses are another matter - for another post), starving the creative industries of creative minds capable of developing the next Google or Facebook, or developing cutting edge tools for making games or films.

Skillset’s Games Forum has acknowledged that getting maths and programming skills back into schools is going to be fundamentally important to the industry going forward, something we have borne in mind when developing the 14-19 Diploma.

So - will we see the effects of this in a generation or so, will technological advances slow down as people stop ‘looking under the hood’ to see if they can improve things?

I suppose you can think of this in a couple of ways - one, race car drivers (bear with me). Anyone (pretty much) can drive a car. But if you want to be one of the Lewis Hamilton’s of this world, I’m fairly sure you need to have more than a rudimentary understanding of mechanics, aerodynamics and ergonomic g-force considerations.

Or this blog. Wordpress is easy to use. I don’t need any coding experience to write things on here. However I make a point of tinkering. I can change the sidebar*, or amend the CSS to change the colours and fonts, but I don’t need to in order to enjoy being a blogger.

And therein lies a problem, and one that can be answered by the creative industries. Why is important to learn about code? So you can make games, websites and all manner of interesting things better.

* If anyone knows how to make it work properly in IE6 drop me a line! Or help me fix the slightly botched referral buttons at the bottom of the page!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Games, Interactive. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.