Atomhawk director warns that, as a result, game design courses aren't preparing students for working in the industry.

Speaking exclusively to Edge, Midway Games veteran and current director of digital art production company Atomhawk, Cumron Ashtiani, expressed concern over the lack of game developers in attendance at the three-monthly regional meetings held by Skillset, the UK wide industry body which supports skills and training for the media industries. Ashtiani warned that the absence of game industry representation meant other media sectors were speaking for games.

"Most of the times when I’ve been, I’ve been the only game industry guy there," he told us. "But there are a load of TV companies there, who always turn up, and they want to crack the social media gaming sector and take their brands into games – they’re not there to ensure standards are correct, they’re there to learn about this new medium."

Ashtiani was also critical of the way universities package their Game Design courses, saying they're very often not game design at all. Part of the reason for this, he claimed, was the amount of time it takes for Skillset to put recommendations in place.

"I visited Teeside University about 18 months ago, and one of the courses they were teaching was game design," he said. "They had an artist who was making fantastic character models, so I told him he should come and see us in the next two weeks. He said, ‘I’m not a character modeller, I’m a game designer’. Clearly, he was a character artist but he was adamant.

"I went back to the Skillset guys and said that it wasn't exactly right, and while they acknowledged that all the universities weren't always teaching the correct thing, the system is too slow and too cumbersome to change direction like that. You can't directly say to a college, 'this course isn't quite right'. You have to make policies, and while I understand that that's the best way to run an industry at a very high level, I don't feel that it gives us, the game industry, enough control over what's happening in these courses on a year by year basis.

"You make a policy, then that comes into effect the year after, then trickles down into a course, which runs for three or four years and by the time you reach the end of the course, you may be reacting to a policy that happened six years ago. I think that Skillset is valuable, but the cross-media nature of Skillset across TV, games, online etc. means that the game industry isn't represented with the precision that it requires.

Staffordshire University games technologies group head, Bobbie Fletcher, responded, telling us that Universities are in a difficult position.

"There are restrictions in the ways universties work and required policies that are not necessarily orientated towards the way the game industry works, in fact they can quite often clash quite badly. If you make the the course title too specific, parents will often question what their kids can get out of it and encourage them to keep their options open.

"So that's very often the reason for having Game Design as the title. We title course based on what an 18 year old will understand of the industry, however, we don't expect all the students to end up as game designers coming out it."

Frontier founder and member of the Skillset Computer Games Skills Council, David Braben, agreed:

"I think there's a real struggle, which is that universities are trying to serve many masters and so we've seen a lot of pretty poor courses out there. Skillset is fighting to try and improve matters, but it's an uphill struggle. The challenge is many-fold. Personally, I'm against people specialising too early anyway, because it does cut down your career choices. But I think there is also an effect of not wanting the courses to be too much like hard work, which a lot of universities aren't saying.

"There's a resistance when students get onto course to doing the mathematical side of things, which unfortunately is very important when it comes to programming. So you see people changing subject. But courses are funded by bums-on-seats per term, so if your course loses a lot of your audience you're in financial trouble. I think that's a fundamental problem; there's a disconnect between how courses are funded and the quality of the course."

Ashtiani said that he thought it was dangerous for universities to sell the "sexy, rock star" side of the industry because they were failing to prepare students for the realities of working for game developers.

We contacted Skillset computer games sector manager, Saint John Walker, who told us that Skillset bases its program of priorities on recommendations from the 15 member-strong Computer Games Skills Council led by Ian Livingstone, and not the regional councils.

“We're based in London, but we take Ashtiani's point and if he would like a higher degree of game companies on those regional councils, we'd be happy to work with him to ensure that happens." he said, adding that Skillset is very aware of the problems inherent in game design courses and is working with the industry to resolve them.

"We have nine accredited computer game courses which have been matched against industry criteria. Industry assessors go into those courses to assess them - the industry should look at those courses which have been defined as /the/ places to engage with because they've taking on board what developers want. We take the point that there is a wide and more variable number of courses out there that aren't fulfilling those criteria and we're dealing with by lobbying the government for dispensation. So the courses that are accredited should be given favourable treatment under any funding regime.

"That's a dialogue we have maintained with the government for a long while.At the moment we're creating an accreditation system for game design course because previously, the industry said to us, 'we want to accredit game art courses and game programming courses as they're very important to us.' But now the industry saying, 'actually, we need desginers as well so we want Skillset to tell us which courses are performing to industry standards and which aren't.’ We're not a monolithic organisation, we're constantly moving with requirements."