This is part of an interview series I’m conducting with games professionals who also teach part-time as adjunct faculty. I was really lucky to get a chance to speak with Tad Leckman, who’s had lengthy careers in both games and teaching about games. He’s also taught full-time and part-time, so had some unique insights and advice!
Tad Leckman has an extensive background in creative leadership for learning and development for artists, designers, writers, and engineers in entertainment. Most recently, he has designed and led Activision Blizzard’s award-winning Level Up U program, whose mission is “To create opportunities for individuals from diverse backgrounds to enter the game industry.” He was also responsible for the “craft” learning and development of video game developers across all Activision and Blizzard studios. Craft learning includes hard skills and software training, as well as foundation and theory, for a broad spectrum of engineering, art, and game design disciplines. Previously, Tad has also held training and learning/development roles at Riot Games, Lucasfilm, and ILM. Tad has taught several undergraduate game design courses for UC Santa Cruz under the Computational Media Department and the Games and Playable Media program. He has also taught at the graduate level for the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program.
Interview
This interview was conducted on August 22nd 2023, and has been edited for length and clarity.
I should have said this before I started recording, but I’m also pleased to say you’re the first person I’m interviewing who I didn’t already know. I’ve been interviewing a lot of people in my own network.
That’s an important milestone in a project like this!
So yes, really pleased to be speaking with you. But also I’ve had a chance to playtest the order of my questions a bit already. So to jump right in- Where do you teach? And what do you do teach there?
So right now I’m teaching at UC Santa Cruz, and I taught a summer class in tabletop roleplaying game adventure design this past summer. And this fall I’m teaching a professional practices class for our graduate students in our Game Design professional master’s program. And that’d be my first time teaching that particular class, so I’m excited for that.
And have you taught elsewhere in the past, or have you always taught at UC Santa Cruz?
No, I’ve taught… So my path may be slightly different than other people you’re speaking to because I’ve taught full-time multiple times. And I’ve taught adjunct as well. So often, either places I started as an adjunct I became a full-time faculty. Or, places I’ve taught full-time I’ve come back later to teach. Which is the case at UCSC, because currently, my full-time job is working at Activision Blizzard, in their learning development team. But, I still like teaching. I do get to teach a little bit as part of my game dev job, but it’s different. But so I’ve taught at… Academy of Art in San Francisco. Savannah College of Art and Design. UC Santa Cruz. And then, my first two adjunct roles were teaching two summer courses at the NYU Center for Advanced Digital Applications, at CADA. I think that’s all the places I’ve officially been an instructor.
How long have you been teaching then, all told?
So I think my first adjunct job was in, for CADA, was 1999. So it’s been a while. Decades. I’m now decades into teaching.
And you sort of already spoke to this, but I want to ask how you started teaching. Normally for most people I’ve been speaking with, that’s “How did you start adjunct teaching?”
Yeah, it’s probably worth expounding upon a little bit. The kind of real origin story of how I started teaching was when I was an undergraduate, at UC Santa Cruz getting my literature degree, I worked at the IT help desk. And one of the things I was tasked with was like, “Oh, well, it would be great if you can help us do some workshops for faculty staff and students on how to use Microsoft Word, and”, back in those days like, how to use the internet and Mosaic and Netscape. And so I started just doing like little one hour [workshops] for faculty and staff. And it was really fun. It was stuff I had intimate knowledge of, so I already had the expertise. So that was one hurdle. And it was low stakes. Everyone was happy to get some help with these things. So I did that a few times while I was an undergrad.
My first job when I left university was actually in visual effects, working in Industrial Light & Magic, in the IT support, like basically as a Macintosh sysadmin tech. But my boss in the computer systems department, he’s like “Oh wait! You told me when you interviewed that you were teaching these little workshops. Our compositors are gonna start using Photoshop for the first time, in Unix. Could you teach them a little ‘Intro to Photoshop’? For people who know how to composite, but they’ve never used Photoshop?” I’m like, of course I could. So I started teaching a few little things on the clock at work, but again, it was mostly workshops. More kind of like tool and technique based, like introductory workshops. But, you know, I think I transitioned to being an artist and working in the art department, and was supervising the pre-visualization team at ILM. And a friend of mine, who is one of our commercial directors from our commercial division, came to my office, and he said, “Hey! What are you doing this summer?”. [Laughs] I was like, I don’t know. He’s like, “I signed up to teach this class for NYU. And I can’t do it because I’ve got a shoot, and I actually think you’d be really good at it, and I think you should teach it.” I was like, wait, what. And it was a course, I think it was called ‘Making a Digital Movie’, and it was just basically a digital filmmaking class, DV with consumer hardware. But with a group of like nine students who had already gone through learning basic 3D, basic compositing. They had a nice SGI lab with all the tools, they just needed someone to help them think about what kind of movie to make, storyboarding it, planning it, shooting it, and then putting that footage together into a little short. And I did that. It was 3 weeks in Manhattan, and it was awesome, CADA’s facility. I don’t know if it still is, but it used to be right on 41st across the street from the library.
Oh, no, I haven’t been up there. [Sadly, it appears CADA no longer exists as its own department. It seems to have been rolled into another division within the School of Continuing & Professional Studies around ten years ago or so]
Yeah, I don’t know where they are. I haven’t talked to them for a while, but it was it was great. That was also my first time visiting New York City, was to work there for three weeks. It was in the summer, it was very hot, but it was great. It was a really good experience. They asked me to come back and do it one more time. That was such a positive experience for me, I got so much out of that. But then, as happens, word got out that Tad taught a class. So I had another friend who was teaching, adjunct, at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. He said, “Hey, they need someone to teach ‘Intro to Computer Graphics’ for their animation program, and I think you’d be really good, because you know about all that stuff. And I think you had a good time teaching at NYU.” And so I was like, Okay, maybe. “It’s a night class. It’s like twice a week.” And so I was like, Okay, is there a syllabus? “I don’t know. I’ll find out.” like Oh, no! And then I started to teach that class. The surprise was, there was a syllabus which I received the day of the first class. So I worked all day at ILM, ten hours a day. Drove to San Francisco, which is like another 40 minute drive. I think the class started like 7. It was like 7 to 10. Got there. The syllabus was like, Word and Powerpoint, none of it was computer graphics. I was like, “What? Who taught this class before?” And so I, the first day of class, I told the students, I’m like, “Hey. Everybody. This is not gonna help you. I’d like to basically put this aside and actually teach you about computer graphics. And teaching things I wish I had known when I started, that I think would be helpful for you.” And they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, please do that.”
So I basically just started figuring out, like, okay, what do I wish I had known? When I started doing computer graphics as an artist like, what are the things that I had to kind of embarrassingly ask coworkers? Like, I don’t know, “what’s an alpha channel? I don’t know what an alpha channel is. What is… I don’t understand what this compression is on this video file”. So I was like, okay, let’s just start with RGB color, and we’ll talk about video, and compression. And then, oh, you probably want to know a little bit about 3D. And keyframe animation. So it really was kind of like the entry level, welcome to animation. It was animation, modeling, and visual effects. The program was all one program with tracks. So these are students going to all those areas. And I talked to some of the other faculty like, “What do you wish they knew before they got to the Maya class? What do you wish they knew before they got to the composite class?” And they’re like, “Oh, my God! It’d be great if they understood just what points and polygons are” and I’m like, oh okay.
So. That was unusual that I think I taught that, like two or three times, as an adjunct, while I was still working at ILM. They offered me a full-time job. I’m now at that point, like seven and a half years into working in visual effects. We just had a baby. So the idea of like, oh, like flexible schedule and easier commute. And I was like, Oh, this actually! And also I was enjoying it. So, Alexander, I think I knew this was something that I should pursue, because very quickly, I started realizing like, Oh, wow! So I work a whole day at ILM. And then I drive to San Francisco, and then I teach for three hours, and I had more energy at the end of that class, that I was getting from the students who were reminding me why I got into entertainment, reminding me why I cared about Film and CG and all the things. So I was like, Wow, that I could get that feeling everyday. [Laughs]
Wow, yeah. It’s incredible hearing you say that. Another person I spoke with said, basically the exact same thing, who also teaches while working full time at a at a company. And how even though it’s this extra work, it ends up being really energizing.
And I totally understand about the schedule flexibility. My partner and I had our first child, a year, or, sixteen months ago. And definitely, the flexible scheduling is a real plus.
It makes things much easier.
So you’d mentioned this already with your current work, that you work full-time but you like teaching, but so what keeps you teaching after all this time?
Definitely the things I mentioned before, so definitely like, I do enjoy helping other people kind of discover things as much as learn things. But also, and I’m sure this will come up multiple times, but, I also like to learn things. And it’s not a secret that teaching things is the best way to learn them, and it took me a while to get over the hump of feeling comfortable signing up to teach things that I wasn’t already an expert in. Just because I was interested, and wanted to dig into learning that thing anyway. But once that got unlocked in me, and once I realized like, Oh, actually, part of being a good instructor is being able to take something, learn it deeply, and then help other people understand what it is, or expose them to things. And in some cases you being new to it, depending on the level of the course, is actually helpful. Because you are closer to that learner’s perspective, and full of genuine enthusiasm for a thing in most cases, instead of like, “Yeah, I’ve been doing this for 30 years”. And so, part of it is to fuel my own desire to learn more things.
And again, this may not be the case with a lot of the folks that you talk to, but, my day job, the craft of teaching is my job. So doing it in other forms is also helpful. I mean just keeping my skills sharp as well. But like, I love games, and I love sharing what I’ve learned about games with students. Basically, for at least the past 20 years, the kind of thread that’s run through all of my roles and all of my adjunct teaching, as well as my full-time jobs, has been helping people either find their career in entertainment, whether it’s an animation or games, or visual effects, or once they’re there, helping them get better and progress through their careers as an artist, or an engineer, or as a designer.
So it’s all coming from the same place of like, “I wanna help people get better at what they do.” But also, I just want to find out more about level design so I’m gonna work with level designers [laughs].
I think another thread that I think would be interesting for you is, another big part of my role for a long time has been helping other people become teachers. So once they hired me full-time at Academy of Art, having taught there adjunct for a while, they started sending me the new people who are like, working during the day at Pixar, or working at PlayStation, and they wanna teach a class, and they don’t know how to approach it, like, Oh, yeah, Let’s go have lunch. Okay, here’s how to think about it. They’re like, “what about assignments and grades?” I’m like, What would be useful for them is to do hands-on that approximates the real work that you do? Like, what would you be looking for in a final piece of let’s say, art or a final model or an asset, like what does ‘good’ look like in the industry? For certain students, that’s the metric they want to be judged against. There is definitely been a difference between teaching at career focused art schools, like private art schools, and public universities like UC Santa Cruz. The brief is different. One is more of like a trade school. One is more, you know, a traditional liberal arts school. But helping people figure out like, Okay, how do I take the thing that I know how to do really well and teach it to other people.
And then, eventually, being given, like… Okay, well, actually. Academy of Art was amazing, because 80% of their faculty is part-time. 20% are full-time. That is their model. So their model really is finding folks from the industry to teach. Schools like Academy of Art, I think SCAD [Savannah College of Art and Design] is another good example, but in a different way. But, like Academy of Art, any schools that are in locations, there are a couple of different schools in like London around their production scene, they want professionals to teach. So folks looking for opportunities to teach while they’re still working, those big private colleges are actually much more aligned with what they’re doing than like a public university might be with more opportunities.
So often I would be given like, the ‘Intro to Computer Graphics’ course. The volume of students at that university is so large they would usually teach like six different sections of that course. Per semester. With 30 students in each.
Wow!
So they would need lots of people to teach that course, but they also want it to be consistent. So my like “Talk to Tad, he’ll help you figure out how to teach” became like “Oh yeah no, you’re gonna be teaching this course. Tad’s gonna also help you understand how to teach it, but make it your own, but also, here’s a real syllabus that Tad has built for you. Oh, and also here’s some sample assignments and some rubrics like… oh, you don’t know what a rubric is, here let me explain what a rubric is for you.” Because it’s all like, you don’t know any of that stuff. If you’re working a day job doing something creative slash technical.
And that’s the biggest complaint that I that I hear from people, is about the difficulty and how there’s a lack of what you’re describing. Basically a lack of that kind of like onboarding a professional into teaching and like, yeah, ‘what’s a rubric? What are what are some good assignments?’ And stuff like that.
Yeah! But even something as basic as “Here’s a syllabus to follow.” Like I’m horrified, horrified, at how many times I’ve like, Oh, that wasn’t just me, that is a thing that happens, like, “yep, we don’t have a syllabus” or “Here it is! It’s really mostly just information about how the students can get support. Some dates.” Oh no. It’s rough.
Yeah, I’ve definitely had my fair share of both. I’ve had, I’ve inherited good syllabi, and I’ve had yeah, some pretty horrible ones.
That first one you mentioned, the computer graphics course taught in Powerpoint, I’m kind of intrigued now at that, as a premise of the class.
I wish I had kept that syllabus too, I really wish, as an artifact. But I had no way of knowing how interesting that would become.
So what do you think are, aside from these things that you’re kind of taking from it at a holistic level, are there any sort of perks that you find from adjunct teaching? You mentioned that time flexibility being one. But is there anything else this brings to mind?
Yeah, there are. Like, there’s weird ones. Like, it’s not a driver of why I sometimes try to keep teaching jobs in, but, having access to Adobe Creative suite to do my own personal work that’s noncommercial that I can learn from. Having low cost licenses for things like SketchUp and other tools, or Maya, it’s like, Oh, that’s actually helpful! And sometimes opening up access to teaching materials or other tutorials that some of those vendors provide, like, that’s great! Also, less important now, but it used to be great to be able to get desk copies of books I was interested in potentially using for my class but were like $70 books. But even now, access to PDFs of those or online versions of those books that normally would be, if I was just someone working in game development who is interested in an area, I can actually have access to some of that things. Having access to the library at our university as a faculty member is great. And an additional kind of community of learning focused peers, that’s another perk as well.
So I think there’s a lot of kind of material and kind of ethereal things about it. It’s also like, frankly, it’s a nice to get a periodic reminder that I actually know things and have expertise. It’s weird, but it is a thing that’s nice to get refreshed every once in a while. In a way that it’s not always built into your day job, or it doesn’t kind of take hold the same way as it does where student asks a weird edge case question, and you can give them a really informative 20 minute discussion about it.
It’s like, “Oh, yeah, no, no, this is how that works. This is why polygon budget’s important, and where you can expend it in different ways. And oh yeah, your edge loops look terrible. Well, let’s talk about why that’s important.” It’s like, I’m not even a modeler, and I know these.
So if those are some of the perks, what are some of the things that you like you like least about it, or the biggest annoyances that that you’ve had?
Yeah. So, I know it’s definitely a challenge, there’s those folks who live in that middle ground between adjunct and full-time faculty which are the lecturer class. And it’s by virtue of teaching a lot of grad students who wanted to move into teaching roles, I’ve had a lot of students who wind up having to teach at like three different institutions to try to cobble together enough classes to make ends meet.
So often, you may have the desire and the ability and the knowledge to teach, but you there may not be the opportunities to do that on a regular basis. Getting connected with a place that might be a good place for you to teach is often hard. It gets easier once you’re kind of established. But, that can be really challenging. And again, it’s an annoyance, if you’ve got a full-time job and you just want to teach, but an imperative if you’re like, no, this is how I’m making my living. And maybe sometimes it’s between professional jobs. Some folks work like run-of-show jobs where they’re on for a year and then they’re dropped from the project or laid off and they gotta find something between. So there’s different levels, but it can be hard to get connected with those teaching opportunities, for sure.
And it’s a ton of work. It’s enjoyable work, but like, it’s a lot of work. And I tend to teach a lot of different things. But even when I teach the same subject repeatedly, I update my coursework every time. You know, especially teaching at UC Santa Cruz, often I will walk into a lecture hall to teach my class, and the previous professor is packing up their stuff. And in a big like public university like UCSC that’s got every subject in the world, like more than once I’ve gone in there, and the person’s packing up their transparencies. For the overhead. That they have clearly been teaching from, whatever their math class is, exactly the same way for the last 20 years, with no changes. I was like that would be great, I can’t do that. Like I feel weird if I’m showing students games if they’re like four years old. I’m like there’s got to be something new, I gotta be able to get some game play footage. Oh I can find something on Youtube, or, I could capture it myself and show them exactly what I want to show them. Oh, guess I need to buy a capture device now and figure that out. So it can be a time suck, again, enjoyable, but it’s like that, you’re stealing time that may not be compensated for also. Not an unknown experience for all teachers of all levels, which is how much extra time you often put in.
And I guess that sort of speaks to some of this as well, but what do you think are, whether they’re annoyances or not, some of the hardest parts of adjunct teaching? Or teaching in general?
We talked about kind of the individual person who’s new to adjunct teaching. Just getting your head around like, rubrics and grading and giving feedback to students, and how that might be different than the way that you give feedback to professionals, like most of us give and receive feedback in our day jobs. That difference can be a lot, and I think if you wind up teaching for a longer period of time, especially coming from a professional lens, grading practices from professors that you might work with who don’t come from a professional background, who are coming from an academic place, sometimes feel like they’re doing the students a disservice, like grade inflation is a real thing. And inheriting students from a previous course, who come into your course, who have been told they’re doing a fantastic job, and they’ve been getting A’s. And then trying to help them understand, like, Okay. But. If your goal is to get through X, or if I’m here to help you get to a professional quality, like, I may not be grading you the same way that some of your other professors have. And some students are very open to that. Some students get very angry about that. Some students are very number focused. Begging for points is something that I never had to deal with until I started teaching. It’s like, wait. Why are you here? “Well, because I need 3 more points to get a B, or to get an A.” I’m like, Okay, well, yeah, you should have done better [laughs]. I don’t really know what else to tell you, and it’s like “just give me the 3 points!”.
So, sometimes your lens as a professional is somewhat at odds with the lens that a professional academic might have. And sometimes that expresses itself in student disappointment, or having to kind of navigate conversations with students. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever had meetings with people at a game studio or an animation studio in my office that ended up in tears. That’s happened multiple times to me as a teacher.
And it’s hard. Because I’ve been teaching so long too, the distance between my age and the students’ age has increased over time. Now, I have a daughter who just turned 20. So in my house I’ve had kind of an analog for a lot of the students. But just the generational, like code switching and figuring out how to communicate with students who are coming from different contexts than you are, can be challenging as well. Shorthand you can use for professionals you can’t use with students. Because I tend to stay connected with student age students, no matter when it is in my age timeline. For others, that’s a really big hurdle. I’ve talked to folks who are like, “It’s really hard for me to communicate with these students because we don’t have the same context.” Like even media context. I find it exciting to introduce students to like movies and games they’ve never experienced before. Other folks are just like “I can’t. How do I teach science fiction design without someone having seen Blade Runner, or even knowing what that is”. Well. Show them Blade Runner. But it does have… there is kind of a… I’ll stop short of saying an emotional like toll that takes on you. But it can be exhausting to have to do that switching communication style, or even context for an audience, on a regular basis. It can be a big switch, that gets harder the further away you are in experience from your students.
Well, definitely other people have not stopped short of calling it emotionally exhausting! [Laughs]. But yeah, I think you’re absolutely right about that gap between student experience. I always find it interesting, like, what games are “current” is always really surprising to me. And even something that’s only, like you said, like a 4 year old example or something, has passed out of memory. And it’s like, as remote to them as like a vintage game from the nineties or eighties would be. I’m always surprised by that. Even if, I’m 37 and even at my age, it’s funny to me some of the things that are becoming ‘lore’ level. Like, I really delight in asking students what they think the ‘save symbol’ represents. Like what the referent is for that, because they’ve never seen a floppy disk.
Oh, that’s great! Yes, that’s a great example.
But the one that was the first time I actually felt like, Oh I’m getting older and I don’t understand the kids today, was that I had read an article that said students know how a folder structure works. And I just didn’t believe it. I was like, that’s impossible. So I poll my students, and like, half the class, they just put everything on their desktop and that’s it. And then the more advanced version was, or I guess not half and half, and so then maybe a quarter of the class were like, “Well, I’ll create a folder for this class, and then just put everything in there.” So like, a 1 deep folder structure, that was the really organized students. And yeah, I was just bowled over.
And I think adjacent to that is like, even versioning files, like saving versions as you go. Everyone just by default just keep saving over the same file over and over again until they have a catastrophic corruption. Interesting, we had a conversation about file structure at work a couple of weeks ago, because somebody was getting a software demo or something, it was probably a Microsoft product, maybe it was even in Teams or someplace, and they’re asking about “Oh, we want to make a structured…” They’re like “No, no. Just everything goes wherever you want, and you can search for it.” I had a colleague who was like, “Yeah, no, that’s not gonna work for me. We need a structure.” And some of us come from places where, like, you would write a script to automatically generate the file structure that you need when you start a new shot or a new project. No, but that’s a great. That’s a great example.
Yeah, so yeah, I’ve definitely encountered that myself.
The other thing I wanted to ask about is, with the colleagues that you have in teaching, are there things that you wish your… and I guess, having been full-time faculty, makes this a little different. But do you ever find there’s things that you wish that full-time faculty understood better about adjuncts, or working with adjuncts?
Ooh, yeah. I think the big thing is that empathy for the different context that they’re coming from. There’s a lot of academic jargon. There’s a lot of assumptions that you know about academic hierarchy and procedure and bureaucracy. That can be very different than other environments. And so it would be nice, I think, for a lot of adjuncts to have to spend less time disambiguating things that their colleagues are saying that they all understand because they’ve been in it since undergrad to graduate school to teaching, it’s all been a continuum for them. But some folks, either it’s been a long time since they were students in academia, or maybe they never went to college. Like, maybe their expertise is such that this is their first time in a structured academic [environment]. So part of it is just kind of the cultural sensitivity, and kind of like, being a little bit more… sharing, and kind of helping folks interpret their new place.
And vice versa too. Understanding the helpful perspective that adjuncts have. That’s a dif that might be useful for them to think about in their more purely academic world. A juxtaposition that I think can be really challenging is a mixed faculty with folks who are purely coming from an academic background, purely coming from an academic writing and publishing background, really thinking about things with from a very different viewpoint. Even just like, writing and communication style. Like academic writing is not meant to be easily understood, it is it’s own kind of obfuscating technique, paired with usually a very practical nuts and bolts approach to someone who’s spent the last 20 years as a level designer.
It can be a kind of culture clash. And students are well aware of that. And I think another tension that sometimes happens is if an adjunct comes in with a lot of industry experience into a faculty that is mostly academic- Wow! Those students are gravitating towards those professional folks. And it can also be a challenge to those full-time faculty, it can kind of challenge their expertise from the students’ viewpoint. And some of them get very defensive. Whereas I think there’s another opportunity which is like, Oh, wait, help me with the academic side, and I’ll give you some insight into the professional side. Some of my most rewarding collaborations with other instructors have been exactly that, which is like oh, wait, you understand the academic side. You know how to structure a class and all, and I’ve got all the practical experience, like “Oh, let me see your examples for that. Oh, those are really good. Oh, here’s a thing or here’s an anecdote, or Oh, there’s a GDC talk you need to look at. I always wish for more collaboration and more integration of those two cultures because they really are two different cultures. Again, depending on the makeup of the faculty. Like that was not an issue at a big private art college. Everybody came from industry or was still working professionally. But wow when you hit someplace like a UC, it is. I’m in the minority now as someone who actually has industry experience. Even though I do kind of straddle both, because I’ve been teaching for so long that I kind of can speak both, like I can present as either.
But in some environments it is very noticeable, and the students are very aware of it. And some of them don’t hold back from their appreciation for practical experience, even if that may be at odds with the mission of the institution that they’re going to. Like, a liberal arts school is not there to get you a career as a 3D character artist. But if you have an instructor who’s a really practiced character artist, that might skew your expectations of what that program can present, at no fault of any of the faculty involved. But it’s a thing that comes up.
Hmm, yeah, I think that’s really insightful. I think that that’s a systemic cause of some other things that people tend to talk about, like feeling isolated from the full-time faculty. So I think that’s a really good point.
The other thing I wanted to ask about- You’d mentioned helping people, bringing in people and helping them become teachers. So I’ve got two questions in that vein. What advice would you give to somebody who’s teaching their first class?
So I usually tell folks, and because of kind of who I am I often get people coming to me like, “I think I want to teach, what should I do?”, which is even a step before what we’re talking about. But my advice is often very similar, which is: offer to do a guest talk. Offer to do a guest lecture in a course, if you know somebody. If you don’t, if there’s a connection between what you studied at your Alma Mater and what you do now, start with the school you went to, and offer to do a talk for them.
And it could be as simple as, if it’s something you’re able to do secrecy-wise with your work, just walk through a project that you worked on. Just talk about your process. It should be something you’re intimate with. Just give us a case study, just walk us through like “I had to create this armor set for World of Warcraft. Here’s the concept art I was given. Here’s my process. Here’s some screenshots along the way,” like, really, that is the simplest thing will be super interesting to students. It’s a low bar to entry for you. That will also give you a chance to meet some faculty and make some connections.
The other thing I tell people to do too is you probably have an early careers or university relations team at the company you work for. Offer to do a talk at a school. Like offer to do a talk for interns. Like there are probably things inside you can do to start prepping yourself. I always love people who are like, “Oh, yeah, I wanna do a talk.” It’s like, great, we’re having a summit or a mixer, or there’s something coming up, or we’ve got interns who have this common interest. Or like, “Wait, you’re a rigger? You should come and talk to the character artists about that thing.” So finding any kind of opportunity to share what you know. Starting though with the stuff that you know intimately, that you can just talk about. It’s a really good way to get started.
And then, be semi-analytical. Find examples of teaching that you like, that you’ve benefited from. Are there GDC talks you’re like, “That was an hour, and I just learned a thing.” Why? Treat it like anything else. Why was that good? Why did this one suck? This was terrible. This one is a thousand words on a slide, and just peppering me with jargon, whereas that person had no words on their slides, they were just showing a screencaps and talking about it, and that was super compelling. So also remember that it’s a skill to develop. And you can be analytical about it, and you should learn from others the same way that you would any other skill you’re developing.
Oof, that’s very good advice. It’s so funny, yeah, being analytical. That it’s something that you can think about, why things are good. It’s so easy to forget that, and I think it’s really worth pointing out.
Well, it’s a tool that I use with students who are like, “what should be on my portfolio?”. I’m like, What portfolios have you been looking at? Like, “Oh yeah, I forgot.” What do I need to know to be a character animator? What are the job descriptions look like that you’ve been looking at? “Wait what?” What portfolios have you been looking at that you can find. “I don’t know what that artwork looks like at that studio.” You could, though! In fact, I think they published an art dump on Art Station two weeks ago that has all of their models with wireframes and unfolded textures. Yeah, you can, it’s all there, you just gotta look for it, and be aware, be reminded. That’s a thing I can do.
Are there any resources that you’d recommend for somebody who’s just teaching for the for the first time? Whether that’s like, a book that you’d recommend, or anything like that, that you’d point someone to?
There’s a, I’ll call him an instructional communicator, data communicator, named Dan Roam. His first book was called The Back of the Napkin. So he’s written a couple of books subsequently about like, how do you form a pitch? But it really is, How do you teach somebody something in an hour. And the structure’s really great. I love that he’s like, “no, use shitty art. You don’t need amazing art, but also, some art is helpful.” I think a place that’s an easy area for folks to get better at, if you’re using things like presentations in your talks, is just learn how to use them, but also, learning about visual communication.
I need to check in with him, because I’m past waiting patiently, Scott McCloud is working on a new book on visual communication. He came to Riot Games and did a preview presentation for us, like ten years ago, and it was amazing. I was like, Scott, what are you doing? He’s like, “It’s gotta be… I’m getting there.” But even Scott’s other books are great, like Understanding Comics is probably my most recommended book in the history of my career. Because it’s all useful. And it’s all just how do I communicate things visually to folks? How do I use words? And also Scott’s presentations. He’s got a couple of TED talks and Youtube talks. Master classes in presenting. With minimal to no words on the screen. With using examples as examples. When I started at SCAD, my orientation week, I was sitting next to Brenda Romero, who just started teaching at SCAD. And so we were both kind of like industry folks. But Scott came to do a talk. And I was sitting next Brenda, I became friends that we were sitting there during Scott’s talk, and we’re like, “This. This is my goal. I want to give a presentation like that.” And so it was like, we want to give McCloudian presentations, they are the best. Speaking of things you can learn from.
So, Dan Roam’s book is great. Scott’s books are great. You know, anything you can do to get examples of and think about, how do you clearly communicate difficult concepts. And frankly, there’s probably a lot of crossover with UI/UX stuff. Just writing and speaking clearly too. It is a skill that not everyone has. But you can get. And I wish I could say like, and buy this book, but that’s a harder one.
Yeah, The Back of The Napkin, I’ve got to go back and read. I read that in college, and I still remember it, but I hadn’t thought about it. I had kind of a weird route to games and to teaching in that I had like a seven year career in data analytics, I was an analytics consultant, and so it’s in the data visualization world and stuff like that.
Oh so you know about presenting data.
Yeah. But a lot of that, like I’ve gone back and read some Edward Tufte books and things like that. But they’re more, you know, high falutin’ theory, they’re interesting but-
They’re dense and academic, they’re not as practical.
Right, they’re not very practical. I bet I’d get a lot out of that now, thinking about that, I mean because I present way more now than I did when I actually cared about that.
It’s interesting too Alexander, because I’ve talked to, I work with our people analytics team a lot. I like to use data to help make a case and tell a story. But often, I’ll ask for a report to get run, and they’ll give me the report, and they’ll just give me what appears to me to be a random graph of some sort. I’m like, Is that the best choice for this data? Like, why are you showing me a pie graph? This feels like it should be a bar graph, but also like, what are those bars? And what is the story that this data is telling? And it’s not a thing that like is a normal part of, gleaning is not necessarily a normal part of being a data analyst, which is crafting the story. Usually it’s helping someone understand the data, but not necessarily the kind of next step. So I think that’s all hugely useful stuff, even just like basic graphic design. Like what colors go well together. Don’t put dark type on a dark background, like there’s so many. But way out of the realm of what most people have to deal with in their normal job. But it’s like, Oh, actually, no! You’re now a communicator of information. Of experience.
I don’t like the kind of the fetishization of storytelling and narrative in the context of teaching. But it kinda is. Like, it’s important. And also, you’re putting on a show. If you’re teaching a class, it’s gotta be entertaining and compelling. Like, okay, here’s another good one, I often think that I’m as influenced by things like The Daily Show, again, entertaining presentation of information, or Last Week Tonight is a great example. They’re basically just doing presentations with a graphic over their shoulder, there’s a lot to learn about that. Like Rachel Maddow, putting together a story that, you’re like, “where is this going?” to “Oh my God, I had a revelation.” We can learn from those presenters of challenging information in an interesting and humorous way. I often think about my lectures are shows, like I’m putting on a show. And it can have a through line, and I can place bread crumbs.
This feels like it’s a little bit more in the like the advanced level of once you kind of get your legs under you, and you figure out like, okay, now, I can at least do the basic stuff. Then it’s like, yes, there’s a better example. But is there also a funny example? Is there a shot from a movie that’s weird that you could use as an example. And lately too, like, I know there’s a Homer Simpson meme that’s exactly perfect for this, that’s fine, if done well. But knowing how to do it well is different than just doing it.
My last question’s then, what else should I ask about? For the future people that I conduct interviews with? Is there anything I should have asked?
That’s a good question! I think, it can be time consuming, but a thing that I think is useful, and we did a little bit of it here, is really leaning into like, How did you get started? What is your path? And I think that’s another thing I would suggest for people too getting started is, put together the talk of how you got to where you are. We all have these weird twisty paths. They’re all interesting to students. But that process, too, can be a really interesting one to go on for yourself to figure out like, Oh, wait! Because then you start identifying the patterns in your own career.
But being able to tell the story of who you are, and being able to do the like, Here’s the 30 minute version., Here’s the 10 minute version, and Here’s a like, Oh, I’ve got like 5 minutes on a panel to discuss who I am. That’s useful both as a thing to do for yourself, but also, I think that’s a great question to [ask]. I know you’re already asking it too, but don’t be afraid to kind of keep pulling with folks, especially at that either something that you’ve seen before that you’re like, “Oh, I think I’m detecting a pattern in the people I’ve talked to” or like, “Oh, that is 100% different than anyone else I’ve talked to.” So I think that’s a good thing to lean into.
That makes sense. Especially since yeah, as you say, everybody does have a winding path, there’s no normal route to this industry, or I guess entertainment generally I think has that kind of quality.
Thank you so much for being generous with your time! I got so much real good insights from your answers. I really appreciate you taking the taking the time to speak with me.
Yeah! Also, I’ll just say like, this is great. Yeah, you did a really good job of moving the conversation forward, getting your questions, so yes obviously I’m not your first one, but that was great! It was a really enjoyable conversation. So well done! I think this is a great topic. There’s a need for this, for sure. So I’m really happy that this is something that you’re helping.
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