UC Irvine offering four year video games program

Well-known for its excellent courses in engineering, business, and medicine, UC Irvine is now pushing into a new area of expertise; video games. The university announced that it had established its Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds earlier this year by joining forces with the Institute for Software Research and the Game Culture and Technology Laboratory. Construction is currently underway on a 4,000 square-foot, 20-room "cyber interaction observatory" for faculty research, and the plans call for floor-to-ceiling projection screens, and advanced 3D displays. The university states that the center's goal is to expand campuswide research activities that draw upon UCI's strengths spanning the social and technological aspects of games and virtual worlds. More than 20 faculty members from computer science, arts, humanities, social science, and education will collaborate in the center tackling topics as diverse as brain-computer interfaces, human-computer interaction, intellectual property in virtual worlds, and games for teaching constructive social values. Students will also be able to learn about the anthropology of virtual worlds, games as performance art, games as literature, and even game criticism. The film and media studies department also carves out machinima as a separate area for exploration.

If all goes according to plan and construction is completed on time, next fall UC Irvine will expand its offering from the center and debut a four year undergraduate program allowing students to declare "game science" as their major. "There are people who will say we're pandering to a trend," said Dan Frost, an informatics lecturer who teaches a popular computer game development course in an interview with the LA Times today. "But this really is intellectually justified. Universities are always doing things that seem crazy at first."

Though ridiculed at first for their decision to take video games more seriously, Frost and executive director Magda El Zarki have been pushing forward with the program for some time. Many courses have been successfully offered at UCI since 2000, including "Comp Sci 113, Computer Game Development" - a project course mostly for seniors where students work in teams of three or four to design and implement a working game, and "University Studies 12ABC, Computer Games as Art, Culture, and Technology," which is a three quarter sequence for freshmen that studies games from a number of perspectives while fulfilling part of the campus' writing and general education requirements. "Studio Art 135, Gaming Studies" has also been an opportunity for students to make critical analysis of various genres of games and gaming theory through playing, writing, and discussion.

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Well-known for its excellent courses in engineering, business, and medicine, UC Irvine is now pushing into a new area of expertise; video games. The university announced that it had established its Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds earlier this year by joining forces with the Institute for Software Research and the Game Culture and Technology Laboratory. Construction is currently underway on a 4,000 square-foot, 20-room "cyber interaction observatory" for faculty research, and the plans call for floor-to-ceiling projection screens, and advanced 3D displays. The university states that the center's goal is to expand campuswide research activities that draw upon UCI's strengths spanning the social and technological aspects of games and virtual worlds. More than 20 faculty members from computer science, arts, humanities, social science, and education will collaborate in the center tackling topics as diverse as brain-computer interfaces, human-computer interaction, intellectual property in virtual worlds, and games for teaching constructive social values. Students will also be able to learn about the anthropology of virtual worlds, games as performance art, games as literature, and even game criticism. The film and media studies department also carves out machinima as a separate area for exploration.

If all goes according to plan and construction is completed on time, next fall UC Irvine will expand its offering from the center and debut a four year undergraduate program allowing students to declare "game science" as their major. "There are people who will say we're pandering to a trend," said Dan Frost, an informatics lecturer who teaches a popular computer game development course in an interview with the LA Times today. "But this really is intellectually justified. Universities are always doing things that seem crazy at first."

Though ridiculed at first for their decision to take video games more seriously, Frost and executive director Magda El Zarki have been pushing forward with the program for some time. Many courses have been successfully offered at UCI since 2000, including "Comp Sci 113, Computer Game Development" - a project course mostly for seniors where students work in teams of three or four to design and implement a working game, and "University Studies 12ABC, Computer Games as Art, Culture, and Technology," which is a three quarter sequence for freshmen that studies games from a number of perspectives while fulfilling part of the campus' writing and general education requirements. "Studio Art 135, Gaming Studies" has also been an opportunity for students to make critical analysis of various genres of games and gaming theory through playing, writing, and discussion.

"A significant number of faculty are doing research related to computer games," El Zarki told us, "and at the University of California, undergraduate education often follows faculty research interests."

If you're looking at all of this and salivating at the thought of enjoying a four-year program at university on your favorite subject, Frost and El Zarki told us that they estimate between 50 and 100 new freshmen each year for the new major. "Qualifications are similar to those for other computer science majors," they informed us. "Strong math and science in high school, but no need for prior computer science or programming courses."

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