Google Fight: Animation vs. Game Design

My friend told me about an interesting site called Google Fight. The user can enter two keywords and enter "Make a fight." Two stick figures battle it out and then the results are displayed. For fun, I compared my Save SMC Blog with the Academy of Entertainment and Technology (AET). Here's the results:



SAVE SMC won! Considering that the Save SMC blog and it's MSN Save SMC mirrored sister blog has only been around since September 2005 and AET has been around since 1997, that's saying a lot about the effort I have done in the last several months. We will see how we do a year from now.

Okay, now to get serious. Let's compare our AET program with other similar ones.



DigiPen Institute of Technology won hands down, with 93,600 results vs. AET with 19,400 results. What about our neighbor, the Art Institute of Los Angeles? It won as well, beating even DigiPen.



And Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California won as well. If you use the words "College" instead of "School," Art Center still brings in more hits (85,300,000).



Now that our school is clearly the loser, let's look at its programs. The primary course of study at the Academy is computer and traditional animation. Interactive Media is in second place. The game development certificate is pending approval.



Web design is extremely higher than animation. Are we focusing our energies in the right area of study at AET? What about game development? Here's the results:



Students are far more interested in game development than computer animation. Game design received an even higher score.



If you use the generic words "animation courses" vs. "game design courses," the later still comes up on top with 9,840,000 compared to 6,260,000. You can play this game for yourself here.

So, is the Academy of Entertainment and Technology meeting the needs of either its students or the entertainment industry? From these simple results, it appears not. The University of Southern California (USC) is working on its game development program with Electronic Arts. USC beats SMC with more than 12 times the Google Fight results.




Shall AET answer the call to adventure and upgrade its programs of study or will we simply fall to the wayside? Only time will tell.

-- Des Manttari,
Editor-in-Chief,
Phoenix Genesis

(c) 2005: Phoenix Genesis/MBS LP

Feel free to link or print this; just include the SAVE SMC URL: http://savesmc.blogspot.com/

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