Chris Child, games technology lecturer at City University London, agrees: "You'll find a lot gaming experts started out by programming games at home as a hobby.
"A lot of the computing and games course lecturers, for example, are still working in the industry because things move very fast and the department needs to keep up to date".
As game design lecturer Dan Pinchbeck explains: "Tim Willits, the creative director of id Software, has talked about this as a central idea in his studio's designs: overwhelm the player, but give them the firepower to get out.
"You're talking about relatively straightforward gameplay driven experiences," says Dan Pinchbeck, an experimental game designer and lecturer in game narrative at Portsmouth University.
Around the same period Ingress launched, prominent game designer and lecturer Jane McGonigal released her book Reality is Broken, wherein she argued that adding "gameful" elements to otherwise non-magical behaviors and tasks could motivate and inspire people.
A native New Zealander, Morris is an independent game developer and lecturer in creative technologies at the prestigious Media Design School in Auckland.
He is also principal lecturer and games course leader at the University of Portsmouth, educational adviser to TIGA, games researcher for the Advanced Games Research Group and had worked in the games industry from 1981 to 2003.
He's now a professor and senior lecturer in game design; he also consults in game development.
Good gave a talk at the Develop conference in Brighton called Gamer Perception of Psychopathy in Characters, which was a review of the research Dr Angela Tinwell, senior lecturer in games and creative technologies at the University of Bolton, did on the 'Uncanny Valley' phenomenon in realistic, human-like characters from animation and video games.
As Antony Cain, a lecturer in games development at Lancaster and Morecambe College, points out in his response to the Gamesindustry.biz story, computer code requires pinpoint written accuracy, so children also pick up literarcy and grammar skills; they learn structure and logic, they learn to organise thought.
