Graduate Study

There are three degree paths available for graduate students interested in games at UC Santa Cruz: the Ph.D. or M.S. in Computer Science with a focus on games, or the Master of Fine Arts in Digital Arts and New Media (DANM). UC Santa Cruz's graduate game programs ranked seventh in the nation in the Princeton Review/GamePro Media 2011 survey, and ninth in 2012. 

Students earning a Ph.D. or M.S. in Computer Science with a focus on games augment their basic computer science knowledge with classes in topics such as Artificial Intelligence in Games, Computer Animation, Playable Media and Interactive Narrative. Graduate-level game courses at UC Santa Cruz are largely taught by tenure-track faculty whose primary research area is games, which is important since research is an essential part of a graduate student's work. To graduate with a Ph.D., each student is required to conduct a body of research culminating in the writing of a doctoral dissertation. The Ph.D. program generally takes five years. The Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) M.F.A. Program focuses on the development and study of digital media and the cultures that they have helped create. Faculty and students come from a variety of backgrounds — the arts, computer engineering, humanities, the sciences, and social sciences — to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research and production while broadly examining digital arts and cultures. The M.F.A. Program is a two-year program organized into four interdependent and equally important pursuits: critique and practicum, core seminars, collaborative research, and pedagogy. Playable Media is the DANM research area with the most active work in games.