Word play: Video games and journalism
October 22, 2013, 7:00 p.m.
Becker College, Weller Academic Center, Lecture Hall/210, 61 Sever Street, Worcester, MA
Alexander Sliwinski is the news editor for game industry news site, Joystiq, and has been a contributor to the site for over half a decade. He is responsible for more than 8,000 posts and is distinguished by his breaking and original news reports. He has a degree in broadcast journalism from Hofstra University, and he is currently studying for his MBA at Northeastern University.
The Franklin M. Loew Lecture Series at Becker College is free and open to the community. This lecture is sponsored by MassDiGI. RSVP to lectures(at)becker.edu. Seating is limited.
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As part of a trade mission to pursue job growth and economic opportunity, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick will be visiting Execution Labs in Montreal. The Governor has specifically identified the game industry as a target sector for collaboration, and wants to learn more about XL’s talent platform as an engine to fund and launch talented teams and hit games.
The Governor will visit XL 3:15pm on October 10th. Game development studios interested in building bonds with the Boston area game community are welcome to attend. More information here.
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Come on down and ”Meet MassDiGI” with NUGDC – a great opportunity to network, talk games and more! All Northeastern game development/creative industries students are welcome.
When: October 3, 2013 – 6:00 p.m.
Where: Northeastern University, 106 West Village G, 450 Parker St., Boston, MA 02115
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Join MassDiGI along with special guests Dejobaan Games, High Class Kitsch, 80HD and Play Nimbus at the Innovation Stage! Click here for more info.
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Come on down, check out the Becker IGDA chapter and “Meet MassDiGI” – a great opportunity to network, talk games and more! All Worcester area game development students are welcome.
When: September 27, 2013 – 6:00 p.m.
Where: Becker College, Weller Academic Center, 61 Sever St., Lecture Hall/210, Worcester, MA
More information can be found here.
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80 William St., future home of the MassDiGI NVC at Becker College.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration has awarded $1.4 million to the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute to help create the MassDiGI New Ventures Center at Becker College. Please click here to read the press release and stories in the Boston Globe, Gamasutra, GamePolitics, MassLive, Develop, GameSpot, Polygon and Worcester Telegram.
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Visit MassDiGI at the Boston Festival of Indie Games on September 14, 2013. Drop by and check out our table – play student-developed games, learn about our program and services and more!
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MassDiGI SIP students show off their games at Open House.
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Playing games with the future
By Tim Loew, executive director, MassDiGI
There were no careers in video game development 20 years ago; not in the way we understand gamedev today. The idea that thousands and thousands of students would dedicate their academic careers – and their futures – to studying game-making would have been viewed as farfetched.
But today, according to the Entertainment Software Association, about 400 US colleges, universities, art and trade schools in all 50 states now offer courses, certificates, and degrees in those fields with more programs coming online each year. And there is a good chance many of these passionate students took part in a game jam, went to one of nearly 700 programs at more than 100 summer game camps, or even published an indie game when they were in high school.
In a multi-billion dollar, highly competitive, fast-moving yet spiky industry driven by talent, this pipeline presents tremendous opportunities and challenges, both in the region and across the nation.
Recently, MassDiGI conducted an informal survey of a sampling of public and private schools in New England and upstate New York, an area that The Princeton Review says is home to several of the top undergraduate and graduate game programs in the US, in order to get a better of understanding of our region’s role in the future of the video game industry.
Eighteen survey respondents, from community colleges to research institutions, reported a total of 3,752 students working towards an undergraduate or graduate degree with a major, minor, or concentration in game design, game programming, game production, game art, game music/audio, animation, media studies, or computer science; 2,407 of those students were reported by the twelve participating institutions in Massachusetts.
Given that the total number of direct game industry employees in our state is just over 2,000, what do local organizations and individuals need to do to ensure our ecosystem can draw, absorb, and retain a healthy share of these young, skilled students after graduation—so necessary if we want to capture their energy to grow our innovation and creative industries?
At MassDiGI, we think about that question every day. And based on our own experiences with students from many institutions, we have a few ideas, some of which are noted below. We certainly could use yours as well; please send them our way.
• Increase access, quantity, and quality of game internship programs for students. In such a rapidly moving industry, connecting students with real-world experience is critical.
• Expand mentorship initiatives for game students and young game entrepreneurs, particularly in areas that complement disciplines such as marketing and analytics.
• Advance the public understanding of what valuable skills these game students have and where those skills can be applied across a broad array of sectors beyond games, including education, training, simulation, publishing, planning, healthcare, advertising, data/scientific visualization, and user interface and experience design.
• Develop targeted policies such as incentives that help game startups and established game companies compete, grow, and expand.
• Play more games!
Clearly, our state and our region have an opportunity to put the amazing skills of these talented young people to work right here. Sit ludos incipiunt!
*This blog originally appeared on Boston.com.
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Playing grown up: The education of a game developer
By Brandon Cimino, junior, Becker College
Everybody knows that “college is a transitional phase.” Put kids in, give them some debt, and adults come out. That’s the standard procedure.
Kids have almost no control over their lives, and that’s stifling. Adults have a ton, and when a kid first starts out as an adult, they tend to either screw up, or be paralyzed for fear that they will. Low-intensity doses of Adulthood buffer the transition from Kid to Grown-Up.
Brandon Cimino
College is full of these buffers, mostly on a personal level: when you eat, what you eat, when you sleep, when you wake up, what you do awake, what you think you should do, whether or not you actually get off your butt and do any of those things you should. What to learn, and what to do with that knowledge.
There’s plenty that college alone can’t, or has difficulty, buffering. Internships, like the MassDiGI Summer Innovation Program (SIP), are the next step up.
There are lots of different reasons to pursue a program such as SIP, and nobody has just one. Some of us have never had our own earned income. Some have never lived away from home for the summer. Some have never even made a video game, and are testing the waters of the game development. For me, I wanted two main things: the first was skill with game development, which is simple enough. The second is trickier – I wanted to see what it felt like to be a grown-up.
I had a key transition when my team, working on BrainFrame, went to meet with our partners, NeuroScouting, in Cambridge. It felt like a field trip for most of the trip there, just one with an oddly small group. I still felt like a student. Then we arrived at the building NeuroScouting worked from. We made our way up the floors and stood outside of the elevators awkwardly until Wesley Clapp, co-founder of NeuroScouting and our main partner, let us in to the work area.
The rooms were huge, open spaces with rows of long tables set up. It would have looked like a cafeteria were there not computers and noses to the grindstone at every seat. I couldn’t help but see everyone in the room and think, “these people are attractive.” Not because they were all pretty, but that I wanted to be near them, and talk to them, and be like them. In my imagination, whenever I glanced at someone’s computer screen I was getting to see something top-secret and super-smart. I have no idea what any of them were working on, but the productivity of the room, the determination in the eyes of everyone there, and the sparks flying from their brains as they each worked on the Next Big Thing, was infectious.
Still, though, I felt like I was on a field trip. I was still on the outside looking in. Then Wes took us to our meeting room, a gorgeous glass box at the corner of the floor. That was when things felt real. I wasn’t going to watch a business meeting, I was going to be in a business meeting. I looked around at my team, curious if they felt this was as important a moment as I did. They were all very calm, and I was glad for it. Wes took a spot at the head of the table, and MassDiGI’s Monty Sharma sat next to him. In what was in my romanticized mind a coming-of-age moment, I sat on Wes’ other side.
The meeting was fantastic. Everyone on our team spoke, and we made a ton of progress. BrainFrame is a tricky project: it’s a gamified self-help tool for the iPad intended to exercise the executive functions, similar to Brain Age and Lumosity. The catch is that NeuroScouting was insistent that every game include user-uploaded photos, that way they could practice skills such as facial recognition, something other tools have difficulty tackling. As neat as that sounded, I was terrified that we simply weren’t going to make that concept work for us. I had no idea if we could make a product that fit their strict requirements that still fulfilled both the needs of the game and the needs of the science.
It’s taken a lot of iteration and compromise, but I think I can now say that the BrainFrame team has managed to produce something that meets those goals. We are ready to deliver this game to NeuroScouting so that they can analyze it’s scientific merit, and ready to show it to others as a game we can be proud of. And while I cannot speak for anyone else, I at least am a huge step closer to being an adult.
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