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Universities Step Up Videogame Studies

Posted by simoniker on from the learning-and-fragging dept.

Thanks to Wired News for their article discussing the continuing rise of academic programs related to videogames, covering the University Of Southern California, who are "...planning to offer a minor degree in the topic in the fall of 2004... it is believed to be the first major research university to do so." The article also notes that, previously, "gaming programs were limited to more-specialized schools such as DigiPen in the Seattle area and art schools like the Art Institute of California in San Francisco, which offers a degree in game art and design. NYU and the University of Washington have certificate programs in video games, and others, like MIT, wrap gaming into media studies programs."

2 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The industry doesn't want this. by schapman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Will these kids be scared of assembler? AHH assembler :P actually, in my program, we learned assembler as the first step to writing shaders. After we spent some time on it though, we switched to HLSL. According to the instructors, the only time anyone in the game industry uses assembly now is after the game is mostly written, and certain parts need to be optimized. also, according to them, the only people who write assembler now, are the poeple who have been doing it for a long time. we are getting to the point where assembler is becoming obselete in games. with things like HLSL, and other higher level shader languages coming out, there wont be much of a need for it soon. Even when I see all the posts on the directx mailing list, i always see render code done in c/c++. The only time the assembler is broken out is for shaders, and even that right now seems to be people finding bugs to fix in the compiler.

    --
    Wouldnt you like to be a pepper too?
  2. Re:The industry doesn't want this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    as an artist and student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and a member of the first class here to take the newly introduced Game Art & Design major, i'd like to say that they do indeed put a major influence on traditional media, and we do everything from paper drawing and clay modeling as well as learn multiple 3D packages throughout our major.