As for corporate welfare for Ubisoft, sure, why not – the government already wasted billions keeping GM/Chrysler going, and working an assembly line is probably just as mind numbing as being a cog in the wheel of a “triple-a” company. All those UOIT graduates need somewhere to work, and video games cause less pollution than cars.

One of the first things i tell students when i visit schools is “Don’t expect your school to *make* you a good [designer, developer, animator - whatever]. You have oodles of time and a bunch of expensive equipment to totally immerse yourself in your craft. Use it!”

That said, i think certain schools set the bar high enough so that bad students simply don’t graduate. i dropped out of Sheridan because i wasn’t a very good artist, and the school could do nothing to change that. i wound up at Seneca College, a school that basically checked for a pulse and a bank account, and you were in. Needless to say, the kwality of work and people coming out of that place left a lot to be desired.

My experience working with interns from several of these game colleges has actually been very positive. There are some bad eggs who aren’t cut out for working in the industry but I think a large number of them do have what it takes, at least for a junior position as an environmental artist or the like. That’s not to say the colleges are any good. I think many of the graduates have what it takes despite the crap game college they attended and not because of it. So while Ubisoft does nothing for me as an indie studio it hopefully will mean jobs for these graduates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfyIvmocgxA&NR=1

Maybe i’m too old and humourless to “get it”? Whether or not it’s a good gag, it’s not well animated. And the class was animation. i’m just suggesting that the vast majority of students coming out of this province’s college-level (and in this case University-level) game design programs likely won’t have the chops to be of use to the industry.

Unless someone’s developing the Dancing Bear Gag Game …

i don’t know where this huge push for content comes from. The Ministry of Culture? Is it a bid to ensure that we don’t end up as a service work country like India? There are worse things, I’m sure. And India’s going to come out with a lot of its own great content ten years from now, after wealthier countries build up their talent and expertise by constantly outsourcing work there.

i’ve always been an in-the-trenches, pay-your-dues kind of guy. i think a company should have to endure a number of service contracts to see what’s what, and to learn from other companies’ mistakes. It makes for good training. It’s never sat right with me that a company can come straight out of the gate and get a $100k Ontario grant for an original property. Let’s put some money towards seasoning these start-ups first, so that less money is wasted through inexperience and mismanagement on original projects.

While we’re yapping, it might be interesting to mention that the OMDC (not to pick on them) is funding other media sectors to digitize their work. This got my back up a little – giving grants to non-interactive companies to do interactive work. For example, they’ll give money to a music company who wants to put its artists’ videos on an iPhone, or a book company who wants to scan its books and put them online, because this is “new”. We gently reminded them that neither mobile video nor The Internatz were “new” technologies. They said that being on mobile was “new” *to the music company*.

So i asked them if there was any money for an interactive digital media company who wanted to publish a book. The answer, predictably, was no.