USC has launched a Bachelor’s degree in video games. I know what you’re thinking. Stop it! No, civilisation is not doomed. (Image on right grabbed from Chip Chick). In fact, this could be rather wonderful, as it will create the opportunity to develop the potential of this medium in so many wonderful ways. It will not be about kids sitting there blowing up stuff and shooting up people. Why do I say this?
I remind you that in 1929 USC founded the first film school (at least in the USA)…. I imagine that people turned up their noses at this. Film is now recognized as a major art form, and a powerful tool for education and expression, with USC continuing to lead the pack in educating artists, visionaries and technicians in that area, feeding the local Industry and well beyond.
Doing a degree in film or movie-making (or “The Cinematic Arts”, as we are supposed to call it, especially since now that 
USC’s Cinema-Television school has renamed itself with that in the title since George Lucas’ $175 million gift of a few weeks ago) does not mean that you are focusing on car chases, so why should studying video games be about fighting aliens (or whatever people do in most video games – I speak as someone who played a game or two of tetris in a bar in Trieste in 1991, and decided that I enjoyed it way too much and so never played a video game again.)
Here’s a nice NPR piece by Laura Sydell about it, with interviews with some USC students about the sorts of ideas and projects they are exploring. Here is the website of the Interactive Media Division at USC. You can read about the new degree here. (It is amusing to notice that their website looks more like a blog than the traditional university website does! This won’t surprise you if you’ve read my earlier posts about the work of some of these exciting divisions… Start with this link, where I chatted a bit about Bob Stein, Cory Doctorow, academic blogging, etc.) There is a lot of overlap with the Cinematic Arts program, as you might imagine. Actually, it has a rather fascinating content… The education you can get at major universities has changed so much since I was an undergraduate. I feel a little bit like a dinosaur.
I hope that the degree in video gaming (“Interactive Media” is the name that is being used… much better) works out. (It will sit alongside the existing Master’s degree already offered.) In particular, it will almost certainly train generations of young thinkers who will broaden and deepen the art, helping to make it into a powerful tool for education and various forms of artistic expression, rather than largely just pure entertainment, as it is now. Aha! Now I’ve got to figure out who in that building I can talk to about sneaking in some good science and science education into the games. Oooh, I can feel a new project idea coming on….
-cvj
Snakes and ladders? Leela: The Game of Self-Knowledge by Harish Johari
The ideas here computationally written to a game board are not new?
Getting a degree by playing games, Wow, this is the best time ever to go to college.
Clifford — you *should* do a collaborative project. After all “interdisciplinary” is one of the favorite words of University administrators, especially if you can put “synergy” near it.
But, yes, why not video games as a storytelling medium? I *have* played a fair number of videogames. There are a few videogames with fairly compelling stories. For instance, Knights of the Old Republic was a better prequel to Star Wars than any of the episodes I-III. Now, granted, it took you some 30-40 hours of play to get through the story, which took (me, at least) months to go from beginning to end. But if you took out a lot of that pesky “gameplay,” the story would have been a movie or two (depending on how many of the individual characters’ stories you wanted to really explore). Was the story something that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well in a movie as it did in a videogame where you’re pulled into the roll of the main character? I dunno. I can see an argument both ways, but I’m a physicist, not a video game academic.
Many video games have very perfunctory stories, needed to get you from one fun action sequence to the next. Nothing deep there, really, so far as literature is concerned. Of course, there’s no story to Tetris, but it’s one of those videogams that has been fun for decades, and has outlasted the best-loved megaproductions of any era. So clearly story isn’t all.
There are a lot of real challenges in games like optimizing the algorithms to get the most out of the machines, developing the AI and coming up with systems for ranking players online.
Some games give you the option of playing as different forms of player … like playing France, Germay, Britian or something in a war game … where you might get different types of troops and equipment.
Which, when you consider massive online play, inevitable leads to issues of how to make the game ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’. So many companies then go through this iterative process of analysing the behavior in the game community and ‘balancing’ the game. This process is not as simple nor as permanent as it would seem as the relative strengths change as the online community develops new strategies.
There are also often extensive tutorials and online communities of people who accumulate knowledge and collect recordings of games for analysis and improvement of strategies. People even collect statistics on the behavior of the game world and create data sets to support the development of strategies by their colleagues.
There is a lot of intelligence both on the player side and the designer side of the equation.
There is a level professionalism and dedication that approaches chess players.
I would love to see and play a game where I get to be a physicist with some new ideas and how they are tested with scientific method. And for more complexity the game could include scientific politics as well. The winner, of course, gets a Nobel Prize.
That was my point… I was making fun of myself pontificating with a distinct lack of hands-on experience. 😉 But hopefully making up for it by realizing the potential of the medium and hoping that it be fulfilled….
I don’t dare look at the link. I might get sucked in!
-cvj
“I speak as someone who played a game or two of tetris in a bar in Trieste in 1991, and decided that I enjoyed it way too much and so never played a video game again”
Lol, it might interest you to know that video games have advanced quite a lot since then…
This is a nice example :
http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=14828&type=mov&pl=game
Oh. I guess that gets me off the hook. I’m not really one for photographing celebrities for the sake of it. Besides, isn’t there one on her website? Stay tuned for an upcoming post on a colloquium she did here at USC. That way, you get something more important -the science that she’s been up to! It should be up later this week, or early next week depending upon just how much time I can cheat back. The Tardis has been under a lot of stress recently.
-cvj
I’m sorry, spyder, I will not be able to attend. A once-per-year proposal deadline is tomorrow and some unplanned (suggested last night by my more-experienced colleague) revisions to my document need my time today. I’ll have to watch the Giants of Cyberspace broadcast from Cory Doctorow’s recording (he said one would be available). I know, I know. I’m missing a great show. 🙁
By the way, Clifford, if you get the chance to visit with Amara today (she is planning on attending the Giants of Cyberspace symposia at USC), please have a picture taken with her for all of us to experience. It would be much appreciated.
In the September 2006 issue of Harper’s there was a forum section that discussed the very sorts of potential developments that such a degree program could enhance and produce. Titled: Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the age of video games, the forum featured: Jane Avrich, Steven Johnson, Raph Koster, Thomas de Zengotita. Steven and Raph are video gaming pioneers and developers who feel strongly that there is great potential for educational programming through video gaming. One hopes that these are efforts that are in the pipeline sooner rather than later.
I think that many people will rethink video games when Spore is released.
–>Will Wright demonstrating Spore.
Yes, I totally agree. That’s why I think video game belong with films and books as something that a university might want to get involved with.
All true…. but be aware that you could change “video game” for “film”, or “book” in everything you said above and it would still be true.
-cvj
Video games make a lot of money and they are used to train soldiers often enough. I think it fits quite nicely into the academic-military-industrial complex. I hope that doesn’t sound too cynical.
I guess I could rephrase: it requires a lot of intelligence to make a video game and its a legitimate contributor to the US economy and the pleasures of childhood; and even has real applications in the real world.