Nick Burton and Tom Hill from Rare spoke about working with graduates, reiterating the point that graduates aren't cheap labour and giving many tips on how a studio can maintain good relations with universities.
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Games:EDU:08 North: Nick Burton
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Hinweis der Redaktion
You all know me – hopefully, and certainly know of Rare and Microsoft Game Studios. If you don’t know me, or at least someone from Rare, my name is Nick Burton and I’m a senior software engineer who’s been with the studio for about 10 years. My day job IS making games. My part time job is education liaison and recruitment manager. I also have another software developer with me today called Tom Hill, who’s been with the studio not quite as long as me, but I’ll introduce Tom properly later. Before I start I just want to apologise for the formal style of this presentation. Those who do know me know I normally like to present in a very informal ‘seat of the pants’ style – but as time is short and I have a lot to go over, its quite scripted today which I’m not to fond of. Anyway lets get to the point: What I call Academic Expansion. At GamesEdu last summer I felt there were too many of us developers telling academics what we wanted, so I wrote an article for GammaSutra explaining our take on working with academia at Rare, our motivations, actions, findings and some advice – not course advice as such as you seem to get plenty of that, even when you might not want, or need it. No, advice on working with, and dealing with developers. Today I want to follow this up with a recap of that article with more emphasis on our industry working closely with academia, I know I’m sort of preaching to the converted here as the developers present are all taking our relationship forward with academia. I want to open up a debate on how we are working together – what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? How can we ALL improve for the sake of our industry and the sake of education! So how on earth I’m I going to break this down in less than 30 minutes? Lets start with,