Swedish Game Education: 2001-2016 : An overview of the past and present of Swedish, academic, game-related educations

This report is written as a part of the EU Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak funded project GameHub Scandinavia. The aim of the project is to provide resources and services to developers, educators, researchers, and supporting actors that are involved in the Scandinavian game industry. The report is intended to be a continuation of a series of reports written at the University of Skövde regarding the state of Swedish game educations. The inaugural report, Spelutbildarindex 2011, provided the first inventory of Swedish game educations on the tertiary level, and intended to discuss their rapid rate of expansion and the ways in which universities and vocational schools accommodated for changing demands in the industry. A second report, Game Development, Education & Incubation, delved deeper into incubation and industry, and provided a larger, but rather brief, overview of game educations in Denmark and Norway as a supplement to the Swedish statistics. This report will essentially describe Swedish game education as a tale of two different eras; the pre-2013 proliferation era, and the post-2013 plateau era. Previously produced reports on the topics were written during a period where game educations were rapidly proliferating, and when the games industry was in a more volatile state than it is currently. The state of both academia and industry differs immensely between this millennium’s two inaugural decades. Throughout the ‘00s, game educations grew at a rate that seemed to favour accommodation for student interests rather than processes of quality assurance, deliberation, and programme improvement. In the ‘10s, the amount of programmes have stopped increasing, and most of the statistics regarding student numbers have plateaued, and are in some cases even decreasing.
GameHub Scandinavia