DEL.ICIO.USVideo game programming a hot college program in Georgia
Growing field creates jobs and schools increase their course offerings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, September 21, 2008
So this guy goes into a supermarket looking for food in a post-apocalyptic world — wait, let’s make it an old, rural grocery store — and the place has been taken over by zombies.
Why can’t he just leave?
JASON GETZ / jgetz@ajc.com/Staff
Associate professor Jon Preston helps student Thomas Shinall of Smyrna in the gaming lab at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta. Computer games have become a major social force, a huge business and an engine for technological innovation.
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How about, maybe, while he’s inside, a tanker truck crashes and catches on fire in front of the exit?
That’s roughly how the conversation went among four seniors planning a project at the Art Institute of Atlanta in a fast-growing field of study: video game design and production. They called their project “Cleanup on Aisle Six.”
More than a dozen Georgia colleges and universities — public and private — offer classes in the field. Just this month, Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta opened a game development lab with 14 stations, part of a new program expected to have more than 100 students within three years. And both Georgia Tech and the Savannah College of Art and Design, institutions with two very different missions, were pioneers in offering graduate degrees in video gaming fields.
“The schools here are doing a very, very good job of meeting the needs of students who are interested in this segment of the entertainment industry,” said Bill Thompson, head of the state’s Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office. “They are embracing it.”
Game production programs are interdisciplinary: At SCAD, game art students must take at least two computer programming courses. And Georgia Tech’s graduate program in digital media is based not in an engineering department but in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture.
Courses range from technical to artistic to conceptual.
In one class, Tech students create games based on literature from Sappho to Seinfeld. A SCAD course takes students through the history of games.
“I certainly talk about Frogger,” said John Sharp, the professor who teaches the course at SCAD’s Atlanta campus, “but we also learn how the industry took the shape it now has.”
Georgia is fertile ground for hiring gaming graduates, said Colleen McCreary, a liaison with colleges for Electronic Arts, the world’s leading producer of interactive entertainment software.
Electronic Arts recruits at Georgia Tech, Spelman and Morehouse and has worked with Southern Poly in developing curricula, McCreary said.
The company also funds a laboratory on SCAD’s Savannah campus, where students work on games the company is developing.
Electronic Arts recently bought a small local company, giving the California-based giant a place in the expanding game-related industry in Georgia. Since 2005, game companies have added about $180 million to the state economy and employ about 2,000 Georgians.
The state Department of Economic Development works with colleges to ensure that they are preparing the designers, technicians and entrepreneurs needed to grow the industry.
But the impact of what goes on in Georgia’s classrooms will extend beyond electronic leisure products, said Janet Murray, director of Georgia Tech’s master’s and doctoral programs in digital media. The technology, vocabulary and forms of interaction developed for computer games could determine how people work and communicate for decades to come.
“Gaming drives innovation in digital media,” said Murray, who is working on a textbook for MIT Press to be called “Inventing the Medium: A Principled Approach to Interactive Design.”
Already game technology is used for teaching, diagnosing and evaluating, said Jon Preston, the Georgia Tech alumnus developing Southern Poly’s new game program.
Want to teach kids about nutrition? Create a game that rewards them for choosing fruits and vegetables over french fries and cookies. Want to help them learn about public policy? Have them maneuver electronically through a maze of governmental bodies.
“When you do something actively and see the result, that reinforces concepts in a way that reading a textbook doesn’t,” Murray said.
Games can help players consider questions of philosophy, ethics and human responsibility, said Murray, whose background is in literature.
Take the game Spore from mega-designer Will Wright of SimCity fame. Spore players grow a species from a unicellular organism.
“This is a game so worth doing against another shooter game,” Murray said.
Her former student Kate Compton of Alpharetta created planets — some covered in croissants and rattlesnakes — for the game.
Compton, who earned a master’s degree in digital media from Tech in 2006, hopes to design games of her own that will “make people talk and think,” she said. “That’s much more exciting than just having big sales.”
With top female faculty members, Tech is attracting more women like Compton to its gaming program, said Celia Pearce, director of the school’s experimental game lab. And as those students take their places in the industry, they are creating games that are more appealing to girls and women than the stereotypical shoot-to-kill genre.
Children of both sexes who play video games may dream of jobs in the field.
But being good at games won’t guarantee success at design, “just like driving a car doesn’t make you a mechanic,” said Derek Rhodarmer, chairman of the media arts and animation department at the Art Institute of Atlanta. “You have to have skills and ability.”
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