Blogs

This week in our Inventing the Future of Games lecture series, we were joined by Isa Stamos, an alumni of UCSC and Director of Product Development for Double Fine Productions.

Video game production is often an overlooked career option for many students that are interested in making video games. However, few realize just how important a role producers play. For many who lack the skill sets required to code games, game production can be a challenging and satisfying career path. Stamos overviews the key components that are essential to good game production.

Generally for every ten people involved in the development of a game, one person involved in production is required. For very large scale games, many producers are required, with tasks ranging from managing a single team to managing the entire game development. Across the board, though, producers run a multifaceted operation and must be and do many things. Producers are project managers, people managers, team managers, product managers, and business managers-all in one. In a nutshell, producers must schedule game development; budget the production; manage the scope of the game; facilitate the process of creating the game; ensure quality control; and assess and mitigate all risks. It is a massive responsibility that requires excellent communication and multitasking.

With less than 24 hours to go, Corporate America is almost at its funding goal. Every little bit helps!

Donate here.

This week in our Inventing the Future of Games series, we were visited by Andrew Gordon, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies.

The human experience is becoming more and more documented as the Internet expands. Millions of lines of text are posted every year to blogs; narratives of the lives of everyday folk. Stories of every kind are constantly typed and uploaded; some mundane, some extraordinary, some moving, and some infuriating. Many of these stories are worth sharing, but in the mass of web content they are lost. What's more, most search engines are not well suited for finding specific types of narratives. It was this problem initially that compelled Andrew Gordon to create his own search engine, one designed specifically to find stories of all kinds.

It works fairly well, too. Gordon's engine has compiled some 23 million narratives to date, slowly filtering through web content, running algorithms designed to find blog posts that matter. If I want, I can find hundreds of stories about the passing of loved family animals, or about protest rallies from Occupy Wall Street. However, Gordon saw more uses for this database than our amusement.

Two new positions have opened in the Center of Games and Playable Media:

Lead Game Programmer:

The UCSC Center for Games and Playable Media is conducting a DARPA funded research effort to transform the problem of proving software correct into a novel, crowd-sourced game. The game will invite users to interact with the data generated by loops to discover invariant conditions, which will be collected and employed to improve the performance of a formal verification engine. UCSC seeks a Lead Game Programmer to drive implementation of this game. Apply to job #1203954 at https://jobs.ucsc.edu

Lead Game Designer:

The UCSC Center for Games and Playable Media is conducting a DARPA funded research effort to transform the problem of proving software correct into a novel, crowd-sourced game. The game will invite users to interact with the data generated by loops to discover invariant conditions, which will be collected and employed to improve the performance of a formal verification engine. UCSC seeks a Lead Game Designer to drive the design of this game. Apply to Job # 1203940 at https://jobs.ucsc.edu