Gamers from around the world are being lured to UCSC, not to play but to learn.
Gamers from around the world are being lured to UCSC, not to play but to learn … well, also to play. That’s because the school is one of the very few places anywhere where they can get an undergraduate or even a graduate degree in game design. The program at the Baskin School of Engineering was launched just four years ago, but it now has 400 undergraduate students and 18 students working toward a Master’s degree or PhD in gaming.
While a handful of other schools, such as MIT, USC, and Georgia Tech, offer degrees in game design, the faculty says that the UCSC program is unique in that it crosses “the disciplinary divide between technology and design.” Most other programs focus mainly on design. “It’s not just about photo-realistic graphics,” says Michael Mateas, who arrived from Georgia Tech to teach at the program. “What we really want is can we really tell new kinds of stories, create new kinds of game experiences.”
The enthusiasm for the program is best summed up in the words of Bob Mitchell, senior programmer at a San Francisco-based game company, who frequently visits the program: “They are doing really cool stuff.” Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
