Minding the Campus has a post on it:

The LA Times just finished a 3-part series on the study of video game design, at the collegiate level. Over 200 schools offer courses in “some aspect of video game development.” On the one hand, these students are actually learning something that employers value – the average salary for a video game designer is $73,600. On the other hand, these students are studying video games for credit.

One, I’d argue this is one of those cases where “on the one hand” outweighs “on the other” by so much that it’s not really an issue.

And two, they’re not studying the video games themselves, the way some colleges offer courses studying Pink Floyd’s The Wall; they’re studying the making of video games, which is incredibly complicated. It would take years of training to learn this, and it dovetails with the computer programming classes many colleges already offer. Today’s video games involve entire teams of people working to create detailed 3-D environments and sophisticated artificial intelligence — I’m sure it’s a fun field to get into, but it’s not slacking by any stretch of the imagination.