Video games and homework aren't always mutually exclusive.
One-hundred-fifty students at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering took an innovative new class on video games this semester, playing them on various consoles designed to provide students with a technical and historical foundation for games.
The course is one of the school's core classes in the Games specialty of its Computer Science degree.
Michael Zyda, creator and Director of the USC GamePipe Laboratory for game development spoke at Penn yesterday. He discussed his mission to reinvigorate computer science and invest more in the research, development and education of new game technology.
GamePipe, founded in 2005, seeks to "create the next generation of interactive entertainment," by embedding each element of the production process within the curriculum.
Zyda created almost 20 new courses to refocus USC's computer science program, which he hopes will help game quality and technology escape from a "very pitiful state."
In the program's interdisciplinary capstone project, Games students collaborate with Cinematic Arts and Fine Arts students to create original video games from start to finish.
The completed projects are displayed at "Demo Day," an event attended by representatives from LucasArts, Google, Disney, Konami, Motorola and other digital enterprises.
However, the program does not focus solely on entertainment. One course covers "serious games." Interested sponsors fund student research and development for serious games with real-life applications in government, health, public policy and education.
Many of the professors at GamePipe were programmers or animators for game heavyweights such as Konami Electronic Arts and THQ.
The students at the talk were impressed with the GamePipe Lab and the technology it has spawned. Engineering freshman James Silverstein "wish[es] Penn had its own program," though he would "consider the USC Masters" program.
A Ph.D. student at Penn's Center for Human Modeling and Simulation, Chris Czyzewicz, lamented that nothing like GamePipe existed in 1999 when he was an undergraduate and that classes about video games were hard to find. USC's program is a testament to "how far games have come in eight years," he said.
Before launching GamePipe at USC, Zyda founded the Modeling Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute in 2000 at California's Naval Postgraduate School.
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