A game design degree only teaches the layer that expires

Studying Digital Game Design is unfortunately a complete waste of time. In gamedev everything you measure in your own game is valid, but almost none of it carries over to another game.

You can treat game design as two layers.

The first layer is genre definitions, market metas, monetization trends, tool stack. Every surface level, outward facing system around design. All of it changes at the speed of light. A system that works today does not work tomorrow, the thing everyone calls “proven not to work by the data” turns into a breakthrough in another genre, and a tool that was used last year can find no place at all this year.

The second layer is perception management, motivation, decision making, economy, social dynamics, viscerality. These can be put into formulas, but what cannot be put into a formula is how they combine in a game. Dozens of variables interact at the same time and throw every prediction in the bin. What this layer gives you is not answers, it is more the capacity to frame a thought and interpret it.

Digital Game Design stays stuck on the first layer, and that layer has already changed before you graduate. Disciplines like CogSci, psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology and philosophy teach the second layer, and that way of thinking transfers to every game as interpretive capacity. It settles the basics of thinking and gives you the chance to understand the player better.

Where academia gets stuck with games is the requirement that knowledge be measurable and generally valid. In games, everything measurable is valid for that one game and only that game, it almost never gives validity to another game, it stays an off shoot theory. Because even the smallest deviation in a feature can change the dynamics. The only thing you can do academically in game design is a case study, and that does not give you portable knowledge.

I cannot respect game academia in Turkey in particular. Without exception, industry experience there is very limited and stuck on the first layer. They start their graduates at the peak of Dunning Kruger. An incredible toxic positivity rules the place.

The pointless confidence injected into their graduates takes a long time to break, and until it breaks they are closed to getting better. The biggest abilities that set a designer apart are being able to question and being able to frame, and that confidence files both of them down.

The only defensible side of Digital Game Design is the environment. And you can get that without paying a truckload of money, in 6 months instead of 4 years, by asking questions and going to game jams.