Industry doesn’t need to pay for anything at all. It has a willing supply of students throwing their money at training themselves. There may be a high attrition rate, winnowing out the students who don’t have the skills or discipline, but from a purely capitalist point of view, that is not industry’s problem.

Industry complains bitterly about the absence of good quality candidates (particularly from the hard STEM subjects), but, in truth, we’re an attractive place to work. We can, generally, attract high-quality candidates.

So on the one hand, we bemoan that courses spoon-feed us great grads; on the other, we’re kind of happy to let the people who won’t make it drop out before we hire them. In other words, from a purely financial point of view, the level of investment in pre-job training that you are talking about seems unnecessary.

(Just to be clear, I think games employers should, and do, invest in Continuous Professional Development. My point is that I struggle to see why, commercially, industry will spontaneously massively increase its recruitment and training costs when in practice it doesn’t need to).

The examples you give (medicine, law), are by nature different. Not only are they important (involving people’s lives or livelhoods), but they banded together to keep the charlatans out (most professions got together, like guilds, not to protect the public but to increase the value/exclusivity of the practitioners). It’s hard to see that happening in the games industry.

I absolutely agree that there is confusion amongst students, educators and industry about what games courses, or university itself, is for. I’m not sure, though that I see any real impetus for change.

(Note, just for the record, I don’t speak for anyone on this subject – I’m just a guy who writes a blog and works in the industry)

The current model of story telling on the web is pretty fragmented. There are really good individual repositories out there (YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket are a few), but they focus primarily on a given category (photos, video), and have limited ability to address linear story telling. Blogging is a potential answer, but while there are close to 200 million blogs, only 600,000 posts occur each day – too many blogs die the slow death of neglect.

Enter Heekya (http://heekya.com/preview.php), a fun, free, easy social story telling platform.

We encourage enhanced digital storytelling through several approaches.

First, we have a fun, easy to use have a simple to use multi-media story builder that allows a story author to tap into their existing base of digital assets on Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket and Facebook. We also let the author use compelling public/shared content from those same sources. Good commenting and annotation tools help enhance the story, and simple sharing tools allow you to both share the story and post/embed it.

Second, we encourage alternate vantage points, allowing someone to clone a story and add or enhance it to create a linked, but unique story reflecting their own point of view.

Third, we have a variety of browsing and discovery tools to let people see stories (and their related threads) along a variety of dimensions, including topic, geography, and social connection.

I’d love to let you try out our product –we’re going into initial alpha testing and we need help! Shoot me an e-mail david at heekya dot com