You know, there’s not a whole lot that can be said about Scotland. Genuinely. I don’t mean that in a bad way or anything but seriously–when’s the last time you heard ANYTHING about Scotland? Planes don’t crash there, they don’t have odd weather, they don’t seem to discover anything, they don’t do anything criminally stupid–it’s like there’s this giant news blackout around Scotland, and I find that pretty strange.

Which is why I was happy to stumble across a newsy bit about the Scots–seems they’ve actually decided to add video game design to the national school curriculum.

A huge head-slapping moment for me personally–I mean, SERIOUSLY. Taking game design so seriously that it’s now a part of a national school curriculum? Over in the States we’re still bickering about how much math and science and whatnot we can wedge in an already-packed curriculum, and here are the Scots saying “…we are focusing on establishing firm foundations for lifelong learning and, for some, specialized study and careers”.

The Scottish gaming market isn’t any great shakes–it currently employs five hundred people and pulls down twenty million pounds sterling per year on average. In US money that’s something like forty million dollars, give or take, and some games make that much by themselves. For crying out loud, French producer Infogrames, you might recall, is looking to make somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty to one hundred million US off sales of one game! Granted, this game is Alone in the Dark, but still.

You’ve got to start somewhere, and insane kudos to the Scots for deciding to make this media of the future a critical component of school success.

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Categories: Video games //