Story Telling - people and critics always say story is important in games. It's often added as an addendum to a list of things your game should have, but actually implementing a compelling narrative in a game is hard. Games narratives get put into the context of literature or movies often, yet they fundamentally function differently and there is a lot of interesting discussion around about how to even talk about game narrative on its own terms. This gets even more abstract for games that don't use 'characters' or are basically an assembly of mechanics.

Given all that, literary and film analysis can be useful to be able to phrase intent.

Marketing - so you've actually finished a game (haha, as if). Now what? We hear about Minecraft or Angry Birds, but the business side of actually promoting and distributing our game is, for many of us, a giant black box. XNA? Sure, put it on XBLIG, but what else can be done to promote it?

Psychiatry - Specifically, how do we learn? How can you teach game mechanics through game play so that people aren't totally lost by your esoteric opus on time manipulation?

Graphic Design - Sure we all know that using Papyrus or Comic Sans is bad, but creating a well designed menus system or UI requires skill. This is only partially a subset of art skills, not necessarily an complete subset - some people can be good designers without being able to draw well.

Story Telling - people and critics always say story is important in games. It's often added as an addendum to a list of things your game should have, but actually implementing a compelling narrative in a game is hard. Games narratives get put into the context of literature or movies often, yet they fundamentally function differently and there is a lot of interesting discussion around about how to even talk about game narrative on its own terms. This gets even more abstract for games that don't use 'characters' or are basically an assembly of mechanics.

Given all that, literary and film analysis can be useful to be able to phrase intent.

Marketing - so you've actually finished a game (haha, as if). Now what? We hear about Minecraft or Angry Birds, but the business side of actually promoting and distributing our game is, for many of us, a giant black box. XNA? Sure, put it on XBLIG, but what else can be done to promote it?

Psychology - Specifically, how do we learn? How can you teach game mechanics through game play so that people aren't totally lost by your esoteric opus on time manipulation?

Graphic Design - Sure we all know that using Papyrus or Comic Sans is bad, but creating a well designed menus system or UI requires skill. This is only partially a subset of art skills, not necessarily an complete subset - some people can be good designers without being able to draw well.