[sonzohan]

Dissatisfaction yes, although it doesn't manifest how you'd expect.

It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.

"The professor made the class unfun."

"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"

I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.

[mike_hearn]

Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up. That feedback is exactly what a male teacher would get if he had the same career history as you.

You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all, and went back into academia where you have been ever since. You say you made a game as part of your PhD, but it's actually a speech therapy program you describe as research. There's nothing wrong with that project for what it is, but your students aren't criticizing you because you're a woman, they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.

I wouldn't bother pointing this contradiction out normally, but it's just so socially destructive to ask students for feedback and then attack them with the nastiest accusation you have access to, just because they requested a more experienced teacher. Poor kids! It's this kind of thing that results in recommendations to just avoid university entirely. Why sign up for being abused by a teacher like that?

[sonzohan]

> You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all

That is not my entire games experience. I have 15 years total, spanning Game Master, lead gameplay engineer, game engineering director, and CTO. I was asked my route to academia, not my entire Gaming Industry CV.

> they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.

Nearly all of them have played games I've worked on, and can even find my name in the credits.

> Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up

You're going to make a bunch of assumptions based on a summary of my academic career and then try to insist that misogyny doesn't exist in tech?

[mike_hearn]

Yes, I've never seen any misogyny in tech, if anything it's the other way around where men are told there are too many of them and their employer would prefer more women. But my criticism of your post isn't related to you being a woman, it's to do with you immediately leaping to the worst possible interpretation of your student feedback. Why assume bad faith immediately? Where's the evidence to support that? Do you just assume any negative feedback always has a hidden agenda?

Look - you say you have made games, and that your students have all played games where they could find your name in the credits. You also get feedback that your students don't believe you. This is a weird problem to have and should be trivial to fix if true. Just... boot up the games and show them where you're credited as the lead gameplay engineer? What do they say when you do that?

[Insanity]

I guess because they also learn there’s still plenty of money to be made in other engineering domains.

And to be honest, I think games are a good stepping stone towards a career in software engineering / computer science. Especially back in the day when getting a game to run required you to mess around with the computer haha

[jakeydus]

My first real interaction with a computer in any technical way was trying to get Age of Mythology to work after I lost my activation key. I won't say that I miss those experiences, but they were foundational as h*ck for me.