COMM 190 (GAME 140) Gaming and Interactive Media (3) The course is an introduction to the digital interactive media industries for students who may consider seeking employment in that sector, which includes video games and simulations, products for education, training, medicine, business, government/military, and virtual environments for a range of applications. Students will learn about industry structures, basic economics, business models, work flow, types of enterprises, job descriptions, and opportunities. It examines both the national and global markets. It provides students with a factually and theoretically informed appreciation of these industries. The course will build on the students' personal and social experiences of these media, but it is not a course about playing or designing games or mastering individual applications. No special knowledge or experience in playing video games, using "serious games," or experiencing virtual worlds is required. It will provide students with the foundation to make a well-informed choice about careers in this sector and respond to their natural curiosity about this pervasive part of their lives. The course is divided into five segments. The first provides general context: history, scale and scope of the field, information on industry structure, business models and operations, and types of skills required. The second focuses on the video game industry, including social, regulatory and ethical issues. Video games are now a major media industry, having surpassed in U.S. revenue both the movie and recorded music industries. The third section looks at "serious games." A "serious game" is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment, such as education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, military, engineering, religion, etc. The fourth segment looks at simulations and virtual worlds and their multiple models and uses (entertainment, learning, business, research, etc.), and the development of related online communities. The final section will examine the interrelationship of these industries with the other entertainment industries in terms of planning, marketing, finance, production, etc. It will conclude with a look ahead at new technologies, markets, business models, advancements in artificial intelligence and the convergence of virtual and material worlds. The course will employ presentations, class discussions, outside readings, demonstrations, videos, class exercises, online explorations, guest experts (in person and via technology), and experiences in virtual worlds.
This course is a comparative introduction to the nature and history of video games as cultural artifacts, from Pong to online role-playing. It introduces students to academic discussion on and creative work in new digital forms including hypertexts, video games, cell phone novels, machinima, and more. Students will survey major debates over the meaning and value of video games, and study some of the major theoretical terms and perspectives developed to elaborate the cultural and sociological value of video games. The course extends students' skills in literary interpretation to a variety of new objects, and makes them aware of the role medium plays in aesthetic development and production. Students will leave with a far sharper understanding of how the interpretive tools used in the humanities can be extended to include new media, and with a sense of the historical role video games have played and will continue to play in global cultural production. Because the course is historically focused, it will spend significant time looking at the differential development of video games in three major regions: the United States, Europe, and East Asia (especially Japan).
gaming 101 a contemporary history of pc and video games
Develop the habits of successful game designers - playing games thoughtfully, and documenting those thoughts. GAME 420 Advanced Game Design (3) Topics covered in this class will include independent game development, marketing, scheduling, and analysis of contemporary games for design choices in something called a "post-mortem." This is done with the intent of training students in the habits of successful game designers- namely, playing games thoughtfully, and then documenting those thoughts. The successful student will have a clear and thoughtful record of at least 15 games he or she has played and analyzed with a critical eye by the end of the semester. These should be peppered with thoughtful critique on the games industry, and musings on trends in game design. This will of course become clear as the course progresses. The culmination of this course will result in the creation of a professional, competent game designer portfolio and blog that can be used in search for a job, to represent oneself as an independent game developer, and to showcase the talents and skills developed over this course and its prerequisite.
Autonomously generating object behavior and content in games. GAME 450 Advanced Game Programming (3) The course is developed in two parts, creating programs to automatically generate object behavior and world content. Students are first introduced to the mathematical basis of vectors and transforms. This is necessary to create engaging characters that properly display behaviors and interact with the player and the world. These behaviors can range from orientating towards the player or pursuing/fleeing from some object in the game. In the presence of obstacles these behaviors require path finding algorithms like A* in order to navigate through the world. Students then learn how to create challenges that adapt their difficulty level based on the user's proficiency and skill in the game. In order to reduce costs and meet the demand to get a product to market, the gaming industry is looking for ways to automate the content generation. Instead of hiring a room-full of artists to generate the layout of a city, a computer can be programmed to dynamically generate this content at run-time, saving not only the work-load of the artists, but also the storage space necessary for the representation of the city. An optimization method like genetic algorithms is presented so that dynamically generated content like the layout of building and streets in a city can be produced at run-time. From the beginning of video games mazes and labyrinths have been a common theme and one of the first examples of run-time generated content. Students are introduced to a variety of maze generation methods using a variety of methods. Fractal geometry is introduced to provide a powerful tool to recursively generate natural looking content like plants and terrain. The mathematical basis of chaotic systems provides the theoretical background necessary to understand the limits of these methods as well as how to apply them to create new content. In addition to the technical content, students are required to demonstrate effective communication skills in these disciplines. Students are required to read and report out on a research paper of historical note or in an emerging field in content generation. Finally, a final project in the course will demonstrate the application of two or more of the concepts covered in the class.
A comparative look at the nature and history of video games as cultural artifacts, from Pond to online role-playing. CMLIT 490 Video Game Studies (3)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. The video game industry is larger than the film industry, and yet the academic study of video games has only just begun. This course is a comparative introduction to the nature and history of video games as cultural artifacts, from Pong to online role-playing. It introduces students to academic discussion on and creative work in new digital forms including hypertexts, video games, cell phone novels, machinima, and more. Studentswill learn basic narrative theory, and study its impact on game studies and game production. They will survey major debates over the meaning and value of video games, and review its history from Pong to contemporary games, including online world-based games. The course extends students' skills in literary interpretation to a variety of new objects, and makes them aware of the role medium plays in aesthetic development and production. Students will leave with a far sharper understanding of how the interpretivetools used in the humanities can be extended to include new media, and with a sense of the historical role video games have played and will continue to play in global cultural production.
The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on minicomputers and mainframes. Spacewar! was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student hobbyists in 1962 as one of the first such games on a video display. The first consumer video game hardware was released in the early 1970s. The first home video game console is the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games are Computer Space and Pong. After its home console conversions, numerous companies sprang up to capture Pong's success in both the arcade and the home by cloning the game, causing a series of boom and bust cycles due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.
From the 2000s and into the 2010s, the industry has seen a shift of demographics as mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets displaced handheld consoles, and casual gaming became an increasing larger sector of the market, as well as a growth in the number of players from China and other areas not traditionally tied to the industry. To take advantage of these shifts, traditional revenue models were supplanted with ongoing revenue stream models such as free-to-play, freemium, and subscription-based games. As triple-A video game production became more costly and risk-averse, opportunities for more experimental and innovative independent game development grew over the 2000s and 2010s, aided by the popularity of mobile and casual gaming and the ease of digital distribution. Hardware and software technology continued to drive improvement in video games, with support for high-definition video at high framerates and for virtual and augmented reality-based games.
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