Study Shows Teen Gamers Like Tech, But Don't All Crave IT Jobs

CIStud writes "If you think playing endless hours of Dungeons & Dragons will create a desire to get into the information technology, think again. A new study by CompTIA of teens and young adults shows that only 17% want to pursue a technology career despite the fact that 97% say they 'love' technology." This can't be any more surprising than that most concert-goers don't intend to be professional musicians, can it? 17% actually sounds like a pretty high figure to me. The article goes on to soften even that number, though: "[I]nterest levels jump when teens and young adults are presented with options for specific jobs. Nearly half of the respondents can see themselves potentially designing video games; 41 percent envision creating applications for mobile devices; 39 percent, designing web pages; and 34 percent, applying technology in fields such as healthcare or education."

as a video game designer

[james_van]

i thoroughly enjoy crushing teenagers' dreams of being video game designers by showing them the reality of it. i show them some code and start talking about physics or shaders and their little souls just deflate. granted, ill occasionally get one that isnt scared off, but most of them just think that because they play of lot of video games, they could design them.

Re:as a video game designer

[james_van]

valid point. with very few exceptions, most of the kids ive ever talked to about game design probably couldn't "design" a game though. They have a few abstract ideas, but when i've challenged them to write some things down and make a few sketches (to at least encourage them to think more in depth and flesh those ideas out) they quickly fold. i usually get stuff like "i want to make a game like WoW, but cooler". so i say "what would you do to make it cooler?" and they reply with " i dont know, add more stuff or something".

Adding one's own toppings

[tepples]

These days anyone can buy a frozen pizza for a dollar and nuke it in the microwave.

Pizzas don't have a mechanism to keep people from adding their own toppings before putting it in a microwave or conventional oven. Console games, on the other hand, do have a cryptographic mechanism to keep end users from adding mods.