I've seen both sides of the importance of education to get what you need to do. I would have to say that the gaming industry and technology in general is going towards a trend that favors the formal education. This wasn't always true in the days when video games could be created out of a garage between two people, but it is more true now in this day and age of people needing to know the jargon of the industry in order to communicate with other people in the field as well as be able to just do what needs to be done without having to catch up with those that did recieve the formal education. There are always exceptions to this rule in both ways, but for the most part, you don't want to depend solely on what you teach yourself because 1) That stupid piece of paper called a diploma can be a deciding factor between two equal resumes and 2) There are a lot of little nooks and crannies and complex standard philosophies about programming that you are unlikely to seek out if left to your own devices. Sometimes it is good to have some concepts stuffed down your throat against your will. You never know when that literature and grammar class may come in handy in the workplace as you work on your game design or coding standards documentation. It's good to be well rounded, no matter what you do for a living.
I've worked with many self taught programmers as well as many formally educated programmers, and I will say now that there is definitely a difference. There is a difference in communications ability, confidence levels, code readability, coding habits, and understanding potential that favors the programmer who received the same standardized education that most other programmers have received.
I won't speak for artists, so I'll just say that this only applies to people interested in their education for purposes of programming in the gaming industry.
On a side note, the gaming industry is not just programmers and artists. For people who know how to use a computer, there is always the ever important quality assurance field. If you can write and have great attention to detail, you might move from QA to writing game design documentation as a part of a design team. There are also many tasks in making a game that involve a computer that non-programmers and non-artists can do. These people are called data-wranglers. They make sure that all of the data is in the correct place to be used by the game. It's a tedious, but important job. Many of these categories are mixed and possibly all done by the same person or groups of persons.
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