There's very little in school that isn't directly applicable. Like, not even just "it's good to be a well-rounded human", but you can literally directly apply almost everything you learn to your craft.
I disagree even though math was my favourite subject in the school. I think I truly only enjoyed math and physics. They were the only subjects I felt like I could actually problem solve and not have to memorise facts I can't relate to or do not know what to do with. But really the maths taught at school also seemed like not really related to creativity, but more like memorise this formula => rote practice with this formula, on and on from there. While if it was about game dev, or programming, it would've been more about learning to problem solve in a bit more creative ways.
> Every good game designer cribs extensively from history and literature.
This highly depends on the game, the designer and multitude of different factors. I despised history when I was in school, but now that I've got older I've grown natural interest towards it which has allowed me to learn it with magnitudes higher effectiveness compared to when I was a child. Without my own life, and trying my own things, I didn't have interest in history, because I hadn't lived, so I didn't have anything to relate it to. I was clueless about people's motivations in history. It was just a compilation of random facts that I was forced to learn. Understanding people, their motivations, goals is the most important part of history, and without understanding those aspects, I just don't understand how I could be interested in history enough to not think of it as random facts.
Why do you disagree though? Math is helpful in game design for: pathfinding, vector math, several graphics effects, physics, smoothing animations, setting up in game currencies, setting up probabilistic gameplay elements, random number generation, terrain generation, calculating enemy field of views, calculating trajectories, creating player controllers, and many other logic pieces in games.
If you want to be a good game designer, it would behoove you to have a strong math background.
What you need is motivation, passion and creativity to achieve a certain goal. It's not a prerequisite to have a strong math background to be able to create a game.
All of these things can be Googled - and even easier nowadays ChatGPT can help you out with learning those things without this type of background required.
Especially as a kid.
I wish I had something like Roblox as a kid. What I used to do was I drew on papers like a story game where different decisions led you to different next set of papers, because I didn't have a computer and/or no one taught me actual coding.
When did you go to school? I think we do a lot better nowadays. As much as people dislike e.g. Common Core, this complaint—a focus on rote algorithms instead of the concepts behind them—was a major reason for the changes.
It is unclear to me whether it is better nowadays, but times are changing quickly, it is hard to even predict future, or future jobs presently, so I think I honestly would be more stressed now if I hadn't set my life, career up, as I was able to do when I was younger.
I just remember school strictly as torture, and my real life beginning when I was able to do actual work and career, that developed my confidence because I was able to achieve real world success at something I naturally enjoy doing.
No point in dwelling on the past, but since we are having this topic, I still would like to question about all the wasted years in the youth.
I think when I started out, it probably was much easier to get coding jobs without any experience, compared to now, so if I was in present time, it would have been much more difficult for me, because ultimately due to all the difficulties I had a very non standard route of getting where I am.
