For the second year in a row, N.C . State received an Honorable Mention from the list, “Top Schools to Study Video Game Design for 2012.”
The list recommends 50 schools from the United States and Canada, with 10 undergraduate and 10 graduate schools on its “Top 10” lists, and 22 undergraduate and eight graduate schools as Honorable Mentions.
N.C . State’s Digital Games Research Center is a focal point for games related to research and teaching and was officially created in May 2007.
Dr. R. Michael Young is an associate professor of computer science and co-director of the DGRC , an initiative that brings together 15 faculty and four different colleges: the Department of Computer Science, the College of Design, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the College of Education.
The faculty of the DGRC teaches classes related to game development in their respective departments and collaborates on research.
“It’s fantastic. I’m really excited about the ranking because it talks to the strength of our program,” Young said.
One of the things making our University’s program different, according to Young, is how accessible several gaming companies are to students.
“Something that is unique about out program here in North Carolina and RTP is that we have a lot of game companies in the triangle. We are really fortunate to have people from the industry on our advisory boards teaching, judging competitions and otherwise involved in education and research. It gives students really great insight to what it’s like to be in the industry,” Young said.
The DGRC focuses on research technology and the science behind that research to show that technology is effective and feasible in games.
“Making games is such a multidisciplinary process involving computer scientists, artists, designers and writers, so we try and bring that into the curriculum,” Young said.
The Department of Computer Science has also offered a game development concentration in the computer science major since 2008.
“We designed the game development concentration in our programs in computer science to produce students who are excellent computer scientists and have a strong focus to build games,” Young said.
In addition to computer science, students in the concentration take classes in game design, Artificial Intelligence, evaluating game designs, and interactive story telling such as how to design algorithms to help games tell stories. The students also have a semester-long class project their senior year where they build one large game. The students work in teams of 10 or 15 people and partner with a class of graphic and industrial design students.
Young said that student-made games that are made in classes sometimes go on to be the source of start-up companies.
One N.C . State computer science graduate who started his own company is Josh Fairhurst , the design and programming leader of Mighty Rabbit Studios. Mighty Rabbit Studios is a developer of episodic role-playing games for mobile devices and PCs. Fairhurst started the company in August of 2010, along with Nic Allen.
“The game design program at N.C . State helped me out tremendously. Mighty Rabbit Studios was founded with venture capital provided by Joystick Labs – the only reason we secured that money was because one of Joystick’s founders had seen my senior design project and was impressed by it,” Fairhurst said.
According to Fairhurst , his classes taught him how to effectively work as a part of a larger team.
“I led a group of six students on the creation of our final project, Terraform . I had to figure out ways to properly utilize each student’s strengths – and avoid their weaknesses. Now that I run my own company, I have to use these skills on a daily basis with my team,” Fairhurst said.
Mighty Rabbit Studios’ debut title game “Saturday Morning RPG” is set to launch in late March or early April.
Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera is a Ph.D . student in the Department of Computer Science and a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow as well as a GEM Fellow. His research deals with the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and game design, or what he calls “narrative affordances.”
“Similar to how a doorknob physically affords you the opportunity to open a door, a particular game’s story will narratively afford what you think will happen next in a game,” Cardona-Rivera said.
Cardona-Rivera said he and his colleagues at the DGRC continuously try to keep up to date with the state of the art in games technology, both in the industry and in academia.
“A big part of what we do is observe successful games and try to decompose them to figure out why they are effective entertainment mediums,” Cardona-Rivera said.
