The Top 10 Gaming Colleges

Pluvius writes "The top-ten list of party schools published by the Princeton Review every year has always been a popular metric among prospective American college students for determining the 'most compatible' university to attend. Because of this, the Global Gaming League has come up with a more geek-oriented list: The First Annual Top Gaming Colleges Survey. The entries were selected based on such factors as proximity to gamer meccas such as Southern California, the frequency of LAN parties, and the existence and strength of a game design curriculum. Here's an excerpt from the number one entry, UT/Austin: 'Last, if you don't feel like leaving your dorm, there's nothing to worry about. A blistering Internet connection will give you LAN pings inside Texas, 30 milliseconds of latency to the East coast and 40 to the West coast. "The Internet connection at the dorms is ****ing amazing. I was [on it] freshman year; I miss that part about moving out of the dorms."'"

Comments

Link in summary wrong

[mrscorpio]

Try this: http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3900

What is that excerpt based on?

[nfsilkey]

To the best of my knowledge, the pipe for UT-Austin is a couple of 'commodity-Internet' OC3s leased from a lone carrier (Qwest). Using the 95th percentile on UTNet's 'busy days', inbound traffic hits around ~350 Mbps. Another thing to note is that the Internet2 uplink for UT-Austin is a Qwest OC12 (either it is or will be a GigE connection to I2 in the near future). Commodity-Internet is somewhat saturated, but decent. The big win is the I2 uplink being blazing (fast and fairly not saturated).

One of the things I experienced as a student in the dorms at UT-Austin (2000-2001) was the leveraging of a throughput quota on ResNet ports. I believe they alotted activated-for-pay ports six gigs of throughput in a given calendar week. Today, things have changed slightly:

• $20 per month / 4 GB per week
• $30 per month / 8 GB per week
• $40 per month / 12 GB per week

So thats a big negative for all the 18-year old network gobblers out there who play GAMEZ and swap FILEZ.

So we are National Champions _and_ Gaming Gods? Sweet. ;)

No mention of NBCC-Miramichi's game-dev program?

[ClassicG]

I realize that NBCC-Miramichi might be a little on the obscure side, since it's both quite small and located in Atlantic Canada, but I understand that their Electronic Game Design was one of the very first gaming-specific programs offered anywhere, and was a little disappointed to see no mention of it at all in the article. It's short (two year) and very focused, with a high dropout rate (~50%), but for those willing to seriously dedicate themselves (which is a requirement for getting into the game industry anyway!), it is a very rewarding experience. Graduates of the program have been scooped up right after graduation (sometimes even before) by some fairly well-known companies, and others have gone on to create their own successful (if small) development studios. As a graduate who has gone on to a have a fairly successful career in the gaming industry, I can definately recommend the program, especially considering that it's also quite affordable as far as education goes.