MARIETTA – The Board of Regents has approved a new bachelor’s degree in computer game design and development for Southern Polytechnic State University, the university announced Tuesday.

SPSU’s school of computing and software engineering has already offered a concentration in game design, but the new degree program is designed to attract more undergraduates to fill a growing need for computer game programmers in the gaming industry.

“This new program will benefit not only Southern Poly in terms of enrollment but the Atlanta metro area as well by creating more careers and expanding the economy,” said Dr. Han Reichgelt, dean of the school of computing and software engineering. “If we start producing those game programmers and keep attracting those gaming companies, then there is the possibility of setting up a very vibrant gaming industry in Atlanta.”

Last summer, SPSU opened a game design and development lab to strengthen the gaming concentrations in software engineering. The lab includes 14 game development stations for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles, though Xbox is the primary platform.

School leaders would like to expand the lab, both in size and in terms of the number of platforms that students can develop for, including portable devices such as the Nintendo DS or Apple’s iPhone.

University spokeswoman Sylvia Carson said the earliest anticipated degree would likely be conferred in spring 2011 or 2012. About 50 students enrolled this year in game-design classes there, she said.

Georgia Trend reported in April that the computer/video game industry had its best year ever in 2008, topping sales of $22 billion. Georgia is home to about 70 video-game companies with about 2,000 workers, according to the magazine.

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Creatures of the deep can’t escape 12-year-old Daniel Leon.

One by one, sharks, marlin and bass are scooped up by Daniel’s net as he navigates his submarine through the crystal-blue water.

But this is no ordinary ocean expedition. A fifth-grader at the Marietta Center for Advanced Academics, Daniel is testing a demo of an educational video game —- one he helped design.

Daniel is among 11 city of Marietta gifted fourth- and fifth-graders working with students from Southern Polytechnic State University to develop an oceanography computer simulation. It’s the first time students from both schools have worked together.

The pilot project is being created through SPSU’s game design and development program, which obtained degree status Tuesday. The game —- funded by a $5,000 state Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) grant —- has been in the works since October with an expected finish date this summer.

The game’s goal is to enhance MCAA’s oceanography course, but educators say its objective is even more far-reaching.

“The video game will help students gain a better understanding of ocean life and human’s impact on this life,” MCAA principal Karen Smits said.

For instance, in the game students earn points by collecting fish, minerals and plants. However, points are deducted if players nab the same fish species twice. That helps players understand the effects of overfishing, said SPSU associate professor Jon Preston, who’s working with both groups of students.

In addition, MCAA students learn critical-thinking skills while outfitting their submarine, buying equipment to fit the needs of a journey. Players are allotted $100, and each tool has a price. Nets, used for catching fish, run $15. Saws, used for cutting plants, cost $20. And to explore ocean depths, students might require extra oxygen or a boost in hull strength. That’ll run $2 per unit.

And that’s not all the young students have to think about.

In a recent meeting between MCAA students and college representatives, SPSU professors popped the game up on a giant screen and posed questions.

How fast should fish move? Relative to their actual speed.

Why can’t sharks chase other fish? They first need to know that other fish exist.

Why hasn’t a giant squid been created? Takes time —- and math.

“The computer is just a bunch of metal and plastic … you have to tell it what to do,” Preston explained.

And it’s not just the elementary kids who are getting schooled. Because the game is geared to a fifth-grade audience, SPSU’s students are learning how to cater to young customers.

“They literally tell us what they want in the game and we code it,” said Dave Hood, a computer science major.

But the MCAA students aren’t just clients. Some members of the design group, along with more than 40 students in the oceanography course, have researched 30 fish for the game.

MCAA’s Smits hopes the venture will pay off for her students. “I’m hoping that they’ll learn the connection between what they do here in school and what they could do with their life after school, in a career.”

Preston wants SPSU to continue partnering with schools. “The sky’s really the limit. And we’re not limited to Marietta schools.”

Young Daniel is pleased with the game so far, but he said it’s still missing a key component: a great white shark.

“I saw the movie [“Jaws”], and I liked it,” Daniel said. “The great white would be really cool to try to catch. But we’d probably have to get a really huge net.”

New gaming degree

The Georgia Board of Regents on Tuesday approved a bachelor’s degree in computer game design and development for Southern Polytechnic State University, making it the first public institution in the state with such a degree.

Other schools, such as Georgia Tech and the Savannah College of Art and Design, have design-based degrees, but Marietta’s SPSU will be the first and only programming-based program. The major starts in the fall and is expected to have more than 100 students in three years, school officials said.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/printedition/2009/05/13/games0513.html

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Register at http://www.tagonline.org/tag-entertainment.php

Tax Panelist include:
Clinton Lowe who is CEO of C. Allen Lowe & Associates, LLC, an executive consulting firm specializing in digital entertainment and tax credits.

Don Mandrik who has practiced entertainment and corporate law with Arnall Golden Gregory, and most recently Miller & Martin where he headed up the firm’s entertainment practice group.

Ric Reitz who is a professional actor, writer, composer, director and producer who has been active in show business for more than 30 years.

Bill Thompson, a communications industry veteran with over 30 years of experience in the film, video, music and television arenas, is head of Georgia’s Film, Music & Digital Entertainment Office.

We will continue the discussion with some of the top investors in the Atlanta market discussing how the these new laws will impact them. They will also give us an overview of what they will be looking for when entrepreneurs bring them new projects and ideas.

Panelist include:
Sig Mosley: Imlay Investments
Mark Grace: Business Builder and Angel Investor
Greg Foster: Noro-Mosley Partners
Steve Weizenecker is Chairman of the Entertainment Group at Adorno & Yoss.
Alan Urech, Sr. Executive, Stoney River Capital Partners LLC

Register at http://www.tagonline.org/tag-entertainment.php

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Monday, March 9
3:00 – 4:30
Skiles 002
Join us for a roundtable discussion with the designers of the FusionFall MMOG as they discuss how this complex game,
merging a variety of diverse cartoon properties was developed by a multi-national team.
Chris Waldron, Game Producer
Sam Lewis, Lead Game Designer
Mario Piedra, Creative Director
Matthew Schwartz, Mission Writer
Celia Pearce, Panel Moderator

www.fusionfall.com

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The amount of scholarships is double the 15 that were available in each of the past two years. The awards are worth $90K in total, and for the first time in the program’s three year history are available to high school students.

Scholarships are also available to full-time students at accredited four-year colleges and universities. The scholarships apply to students pursuing videogame careers in the field of graphic design, computer science, animation, programming, digital entertainment or software engineering.

Students may apply online for one $3,000 scholarship for the 2009-2010 academic year until May 15.

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Living Game Worlds IV – Interplay: Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

December 1-2, 2008

Georgia Tech

Technology Square Research Building

85 5th Street, Atlanta, GA

Step in to the vanguard of digital gaming at Georgia Tech’s 4th annual Living Game Worlds symposium to be held December 1-2, 2008. Raph Koster and Chris Klaus headline this year’s conference which will showcase “InterPlay,” networked online play and the rapidly-growing domains of multiplayer games and virtual worlds. The symposium will also feature a pioneers panel including luminaries Richard Bartle, Brian Green, Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer and Pavel Curtis. Also, don’t miss the chance to see the latest demos from Georgia Tech’s Digital Media Program, EGL, and GVU. Early registration ends October 31. Register now at http://gameworlds.gatech.edu

Media Inquiries: gameworlds-media@lists.gatech.edu
All other Inquiries: gameworlds@lists.gatech.edu

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by Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, PH.D. on Tuesday, October 14, 2008

It has been over 30 years since online virtual worlds have started to emerge in the form of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Over this time period several variants of virtual worlds have emerged, with each form having different opportunities and challenges for the developers.

Only in the last five years or so have virtual worlds attained the attention of the general media, where they are often simplistically categorized as virtual realities. The general media then often tries to measure or categorize these virtual realities by finding commonality with real life – trying to understand these new realities by comparing them to our daily lives, our own reality.

This often leads to misunderstandings about what virtual worlds really are. It is true that some virtual worlds are simply an extension of real life. One can even assert that the entire Internet is a virtual world where people come together to share information and to communicate with each other. However, the largest virtual worlds that are out there are worlds that offer you a different experience – giving the user the opportunity to participate in another world, another universe. This participation is just as rewarding and real as the experience that we have in our daily lives but these worlds are not and should not be reality. These worlds are the game worlds of the Internet – massively multiplayer online games or MMOs in short.

Maybe he can help America solve its financial crisis?

MMOs can be defined as closed worlds since they offer access to a fantasy or sci-fi environment that have no direct link to our real life. Hence, these alternate universes are an addition to our real life, not an extension, and they enhance and improve it.

EVE Online is a single shard universe that offers those who participate in that world a rewarding experience. One feature that is often highlighted as the most unique thing about EVE Online is the vibrant economy that thrives within it – often quoted as a realistic experience. Stating that the economy in EVE is realistic is wrong. The economy in EVE is actually just as real as our real life economies, by all measures and definition of economic value based on economic theory. This fact has great implications in terms of how to interpret information from economies in virtual worlds, and shows that economics must be used as a fundamental feature in the design and operation of these worlds.

What makes the economy in EVE real is the fact that without player production of spaceships, ammunition, modules and other items, there would be no EVE. Everything produced and consumed in EVE is based on players’ preferences and their valuation of those items. The players are real and hence their valuation is real.

These decisions evolve around production, trade, war and politics – the same ingredients that we have in all other societies created by mankind. EVE is therefore truly an alternate universe where people are making decisions that affect other people who participate in the same universe.

This level of complexity is only possible due to the single world (single shard) approach in the design of EVE Online. Everyone who participates in EVE Online is participating in the same world with almost a quarter of a million total subscribers and anywhere between 30,000 to 40,000 of them playing at any given time. Hence the action of one player has the potential to impact the virtual well-being of another player. Players are also dependent on each other for the production of goods and services that help you survive in the harsh environment of EVE. And the harsh environment leads to decisions that have real impact on your own well-being. In EVE you are always at risk of losing your ship, your training and items that you carry around with you. And even though it is possible to minimize the financial loss through insurance services, you still know that any action in EVE bears an element of risk. This results in different kinds of behavior amongst the players based on their own risk awareness. Hence, we have players that like to specialize in different professions within EVE ranging from industrial activities to fleet fights and even space piracy.

In 1776 Adam Smith wrote that in order to increase wealth, nations must focus on increasing specialization of the workforce and encourage the formation of markets and external trade activities. This same principle applies in a large-scale virtual world like EVE Online. The environment must be designed from the beginning with economic principles in mind. One of the reasons for the success of EVE Online is that the developers had a clear vision of a large player-driven economy. The initial design accommodated tools and structures that would allow for dynamic trade activities where the key to success would be information. This also meant that in the early stages of the game, before the player population reached a critical mass, a different management method of the market was needed than what is in place today. In the beginning, the developers had to be “hands on” with many aspects of the market, making sure that there was enough supply and demand for various items in the game. However, with the current population size the market has become completely player-driven. This means that the developers now approach the management of the economy with a laissez-faire attitude – only intervening if there are obvious game balance issues that must be addressed.

With such a different and diverse population of players within a single world, it becomes a challenge to make sure that the developer is able to communicate with the population about future development of the virtual world. But the single universe approach allows CCP, as developers of EVE, to approach this challenge in a very innovative and unique, yet classical way.

In order to make sure that CCP listens to the voices of those that participate in the EVE experience, a democratically-elected representative council of players was established earlier this year. This is the Council of Stellar Management (CSM). It has the obligation of bringing the most pressing issues from the community to CCP’s development team. There are nine representatives on this council and each term is six months. The first council will end its term this November. We at CCP have been very pleased with the communication with this new council and many of the issues that they have brought forward will impact the current and future development of EVE Online. The best measure for the success of the CSM is that preparations for the next elections are already under way.

Conclusion
EVE Online is an alternate experience that enhances the real life of those who participate in this world. It is a vast, complex universe that is designed as a sandbox and allows its participants to determine what kind of experience they will have within its confines. In the five years that this world has been in operation, it has really evolved to become a virtual society with all the same basic social structures that have been found in all societies created by mankind, such as a complex economic system that produces real economic value, territorial warfare and politics. Are we perhaps seeing the birth of the first virtual nation?

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By Gayle White

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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?

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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