Games @ UCSC

 
Games
 
Computer games are changing our world. They are many things: a major new media form, a rapidly growing international industry, a driver of technological and cultural innovation, and a research area where cutting edge approaches are applied to challenging engineering, social, and design problems.
 
Games are a global phenomenon, and here in California they are having particularly strong impact: in a nation that purchased $20 billion of computer games and equipment in 2009, the Entertainment Software Association estimates the the largest center of U.S. games industry employment (40% ) is in California. California is home to many of the largest computer game companies worldwide, including Activision/Blizzard, Disney Interactive, Electronic Arts, Sony, and THQ. It is also home to some of the most innovative small studios and independent game developers in the world. Computer games have flourished in California -- in part, because California is a center of technological expertise.
 
Games @ UCSC
 
UC Santa Cruz is a leader in computer games research and education. It boasts the first computer games degree in the University of California system, and one of the largest technical game research groups in the world. UCSC is located near one of the world's leading regions of game development and innovation. Here researchers and students from across the campus participate in departmental and interdisciplinary games labs and games degree programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Faculty of UCSC currently doing work and teaching in the area of computer games include Arnav Jhala, Sri Kurniawan, Michael Mateas, Marilyn Walker, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Jim Whitehead, and Warren Sack, and many others. Their topics are diverse, from game authoring tools and story structures to automatic game generation or game analysis.
 
Undergraduate Study
 
Undergraduate students at UC Santa Cruz have access to a wide variety of games-related course offerings relevant to most aspects of games research and design, with topics including Architecture, AI, Critical Game Studies, Design, Engine Scripting, Games and Society, Graphics, HCI and Playtesting, History of Games, Interactive Storytelling, Platforms, Programming, and Web Games Engineering. These course offerings are not only broad in scope, but games courses at UCSC are largely taught by tenure-track faculty whose primary research area is games, rather than by lecturers or by faculty who teach games as a motivating example for some other topic.
 
Undergraduates at UCSC may choose to pursue a degree in games: the Bachelor of Science:Computer Science in Computer Game Design. The games major at UCSC offers many critical and competitive advantages for undergraduates. Students begin receiving rigorous technical training, taking classes infused with cutting-edge research results, and doing team-based game development projects from the first year of the program. The degree program culminates in a year-long studio course in which student teams each develop a game of their own design for a platform of their choice (from PS3 to iPhone to Facebook).
 
Graduate Study
 
Graduate students at UC Santa Cruz have two degree paths available: the Ph.D. in Computer Science with a focus on games, or the Master of Fine Arts in Digital Arts and New Media (DANM). Graduate study generally takes place within the context of one of UCSC's well-known research labs or studios, such as the Expressive Intelligence Studio (EIS).