As a young college student living in the uk soon I have to apply to universaities for the course I want to take. Its long been my ambition to work in the computer gaming industry nad have long been interested in games design and development courses around the country such as the 4 year course here at Abertay Dundee (http://www.abertay.ac.uk/) however I have been wondering which is seen as a better qualification a Computer Science degree or a degree relating directly to games design? Would a degree relating to games give me an advantage or should I play safe with a degree that would let me branch out into other fields of computing if my planne dcareaer making games never works out?

Hi there,

There is no simple answer to your question but here are some things to think about. The computer games technology course at abertay is not just learing about computer games programming but also gives a firm grounding in computer science in general too. If you study on the abertay course then you do not need to end up in the computer games industry since your studies will allow you to take up employment in many different areas of computing.

If your aim however is to become a games programmer, then you would be well advised to take a course in games programming since this will give you lots of experience and exposure in the games industry and will also allow you to generate contact with other like minded people and workers in the games industry.

The work you will do on the course will be related to all aspects of games design: programming, modelling, computer science, mathematics, physics etc. and this will be very difficult to find on a general computing type course.

If at the end of the day you find that you don''t want to work in computer games, then nothing really lost since you will have a good education and be very employable in many areas of computing, media, entertainment, multimedia, modelling etc.

The only other thing i feel that i should add to this is that my opinion might be a bit biased since I am a lecture in computer games programming at The University of Abertay Dundee.

If you would like further comments about the course then feel free to email me at h.s.fortuna@tay.ac.uk

I hope your career works out for you but it is now that you must make some well thought out decisions.

henry