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Students
taking Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's latest minor, in video-game
studies, won't have to pay their tuition in quarters.
And Tetris is not a
prerequisite.
Game Studies is
serious stuff. As video games become a major industry and a part of more
than just prepubescent lives, they are also earning a home within academia.
"This is the
first interactive generation growing up -- they use interactive media the
way my parents used the radio," said Kathleen Ruiz, co-director of the
program and associate professor of multidisciplinary electronic arts at RPI.
A title like that may
sound like the absolute death of fun. But the participants in the field --
who include not just programmers, but writers and artists and psychologists
-- are intent on coming up with new ways of playing games. Many of the
current ones, based on hoary old shoot-em-ups,
are getting a little old, some say.
"The commercial game
industry is in a little bit of a rut," said Ernest W. Adams, a game designer and consultant who was in Troy to participate in a two-day symposium to mark the
minor's arrival.
So, yes, the game
industry has figured out how to do big action pieces, the interactive
bang-bang that makes parents squirm and teenage boys giddy. "That's
only one kind of movie -- we can't do 'On Golden Pond,' " said Adams,
who has worked on games including the John Madden football franchise. "We're waiting for our impressionists."
The industry reaped
$10 billion in sales last year, compared with movie box office sales of
about $9.5 billion. That alone is enough to justify its presence as an
academic discipline, Adams said.
Producing a hit game
costs millions, though, and the industry has tended to stick to the
formulaic. Ruiz, who has had work sponsored by Sony, expects big things
when different disciplines mix.
"The artists are
not just in their little art zone," she said. "The world is
becoming more complex, and you really need to work together to find
solutions."
RPI students enrolled in Ruiz's classes already have come
up with some games that don't look like they fell out of the corporate
machine, such as one meant for the blind that uses sound instead of
pictures. Players move through darkness to collect the elements of nature
to rebuild society.
Or one that casts the
player as a person of privilege -- or not -- and requires them to solve
puzzles and problems in that guise.
Some of the latest
games try to erase the walls between virtual reality and physical reality.
RPI expects 100 students to enroll in the minor during
its first year. It's not alone in this new field of "arcademia." Last month, Princeton
held a session on video game studies. Carnegie Mellon University, Southern
Methodist University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Irvine are among the schools offering programs or courses in
game design.
As the discipline
evolves, expect more work on how games affect those who play them, such as
whether violent games harm children.
"There's a lot of very confidently uttered sentences out
there about what games do and very few answers," said Ralph Noble, a
cognitive science professor at RPI.
More people will be
looking for those answers.
"Games are an
important part of culture now, and it's here to
stay," Ruiz said.
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