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Dear Befuddled,
It's very simple, really. To a game hirer, what you have is "education" and "knowledge" and "practice." To a hirer, "experience" is shorthand for "work experience." When a hirer advertises looking for someone with "experience," they mean they want someone who has held a paid full-time job in the game industry for X years.
I assume that your resume touts your knowledge of programs, operating systems, etc. as "experience," when those should instead be listed under "Programs, Environments, Tools, Languages." Re-write your resume without referring to your class subjects and projects as "experience," and that should work better for you.
I assume also that you've been applying for jobs that are above your level. Just apply for entry-level positions and you should be able to get your break.
Good luck!
Addendum:
Think of "experience" as equating with "credits" (your name listed as contributor in a published game). Whether or not credits in indie games count as "experience" is a gray area. If the indie game was published on a viable platform (the iTunes store, Facebook, etc.) and was reviewed by game magazine reviewers and later picked up by a game publisher, then the work you did on that indie game looks good on your résumé -- and the work you did on that indie game would probably count as "experience," even if you were never paid a wage for it. If you worked without pay on an indie game that was never finished, that's not "experience" to a game hirer. If you worked without pay on an indie game that was finished and posted on an obscure website and nobody ever heard of it, that also is probably not going to be regarded as "experience" by a game hirer. If you worked for pay on a game that was cancelled and never released, that might arguably count as "experience" -- but it doesn't count for much.
If you worked solo on several games after graduation, that doesn't count as "experience" -- it mainly counts as "portfolio building" or self-teaching (continuing the learning, post-graduation).
The main point of this article is that you have to be mindful of what the word "experience" means to hirers, regardless of what it might mean to you. Don't use the word lightly or extravagantly, and don't try to bend the word's meaning to suit your own purposes.
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© 2006, 2013 Tom Sloper. All rights reserved. May not be re-published without written permission of the author.
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