On the “College or no College” debate, here are my 2 cents:
In high school I was a self taught video game programmer making money writing and selling video games (back when 1 person could make a video game).
I told my dad I wasn’t going to college because I was already doing what I wanted to do, I didn’t need to learn anything from college.
Best advice I was ever given (that I actually took) was to go to college anyway because there is more to learn than simply how to write video games.
As Pochacco said, college fills in those gaps that allows a programmer to work well within the industry (this applies to computing in general). In addition, I learned many things applicable to games (lots of math, logic, physics), and many things I didn’t use until much later, in other areas of computing.
I don’t have a whole heck of a lot to offer after all the sage advice presented above, but I did want to throw in my two cents WRT to two things:
- If your son must have a video-game–centric program, there is both DigiPen in Washington state that, last I checked, was largely funded (and, if you believe the hype, heavily recruited from) by Nintendo. There’s also a school called Full Sail that is in, IIRC, Florida, though I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about them.
That said, the advice to pursue a straight CS degree sounds like much better advice to me.
- Partly to see if your son has, for lack of a better word, the temperament for game design, and partly to build his portfolio if he does, he may want to pick up one (of several) level/map-design kits available for the big-name first-person shooters. One good thing about this is that it’s possible (though, I imagine, not easy) to develop a reputation by doing this.
IIRC, this is how American McGee got his start, and I’ve heard other, though smaller, stories of how good level designers got picked up by companies such as Blizzard, etc.