Press

Graduate student John Murray writes about his experience at the CodeCamp, sponsored by Microsoft Research, earlier this summer.. [read more]

Associate Professor Warren Sack talks about his work in creating spaces and tools for the public to engage with government. Sack explores ways that technology and game design can help the public understand and participate in policy-making. [read more]

Assistant Professor Arnav Jhala was one of three guests to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down California's ban on the sale of violent video games to minors. [read more]

There were many brilliant and distinguished guests at the Inventing the Future of Games Symposium last month hosted by UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media. There was the perennially innovative Will Wright.... There was Rod Humble....But no one there sounded more like a futurist than UCSC’s own Professor Michael Mateas. [read more]

Video games are moving out of the dorm and into the library.... Michael Mateas, an associate professor at the University of Santa Cruz and the director of its Center for Games and Playable Media, says there are "historical touchstones" that all gaming-design students should play. Syllabi for courses at Santa Cruz include a "playlist," with a selection of games students are required to play, and he and other professors regularly work with the library to determine what titles it should obtain. [read more]

This is the time I'm least certain about the future of games that I've ever been in my entire life," said Linden Labs CEO Rod Humble, as he delivered a Gamasutra-attended talk on that future. "The way our art form is spreading across the globe, I find it hard to keep track of," he said. "I have to say a lot of things I had hoped would happen, happened. And I think we've made it to the Promised Land," he told the audience at UC Santa Cruz's Inventing the Future of Games symposium. [read more]

Last Friday at the Inventing the Future of Games symposium hosted by the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media, students showcased Prom Week, a social simulation game built for Facebook. The game presents some interesting challenges for games that go for deep social integration with Facebook’s social network features. [read more]

This past Friday at UC Santa Cruz's Inventing the Future of Games symposium, Will Wright delivered a Gamasutra-attended talk in which he discussed how technology and human perception will blend to bring games to a higher level. [read more]

Will Wright is perhaps the most successful video game designer in history, creating games from SimCity to Spore. His games have sold tens of millions of units and they have opened up new genres such as life simulations and “god” games. So there’s nobody better to talk about the future of video games. At a recent talk [part of UC Santa Cruz's Inventing the Future of Games symposium], Wright predicted games will become ubiquitous, more diverse, and meaningful works of art. [read more]

Michael Mateas, director of the University of California, Santa Cruz's Center for Games and Playable Media opened up the center's Gamasutra-attended symposium, Inventing the Future of Games, in Milpitas, California today. In his speech he discussed the drive of USCS's program, and talked about how research drives innovation in other industries -- and how he believes research should also drive games. He also gave examples of how current work at the Center for Games and Playable Media is doing that today. [read more]

Marilyn Walker, Director of the University of California, Santa Cruz's Games and Playable Media program's natural language and dialogue systems division, presented a talk at the school's Future of Games symposium today that delved into how the group hopes to get closer to generative dialogue that can respond to player interaction. [read more]

As part of UCSC's Inventing the Future of Play symposium today, veteran developer Graeme Devine (The 7th Guest, Halo Wars) discussed how he tries to draw the player into a game as the lead character. "I only really got into games so that I could tell stories," said Devine. [read more]

At UCSC's Inventing the Future of Play symposium today, narrative designer, interactive fiction expert and writer Emily Short presented a short talk called "The Listening Player," where she discussed a game project in which dialogue forms the core of the gameplay. [read more]

Every episode of havoc, horror and heroism needs a good soundtrack. So a new generation of musicians, crouched over computers at UC Santa Cruz, are composing the themes for tomorrow's video games, an art form as engaging to their peers as waltzes were to 1880s Viennese, modern art to late-1940s New Yorkers, or beat poetry to 1950s San Franciscans. [read more]

Game industry experts and researchers had better finish their taxes early this year. On April 15 in Silicon Valley, they'll discuss the future and cultural impacts of games at a symposium hosted by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games & Playable Media. [read more]

The Computer Science department at the University of California at Santa Cruz has a few tricks up its sleeve with regard to artificial intelligence. RCR Wireless News spoke with Benjamin Samuel, a PH.D. student in the Games and Playable Media Center’s Expressive Intelligence Studio, who says his group is working to create an advanced social artificial intelligence, useful in a gaming scenario. [read more]

Hot off the presses of GamePro issue #271 comes The Princeton Review's rankings for the top 10 game design graduate and undergraduate programs in North America. UC Santa Cruz ranked seventh for its graduate programs. [read more]

Vanessa Valencia, a sophomore game design student at UC Santa Cruz, hopes one day to develop video games....She and about 50 other UCSC students with similar aspirations participated in the third annual Global Game Jam this weekend. [read more]

"My focus has really been on AI as a form of expression," Michael Mateas told me. Mateas is a professor at University of California Santa Cruz's Center for Games and Playable Media and one half of the design team that made Façade, the 2006 conversation game about an awkward dinner with a couple on the verge of breaking up. [read more]

The Global Game Jam was born in January 2009, and UC Santa Cruz has hosted one stage of the event since that inaugural year. "A lot of innovative games come out of there," said Foaad Khosmood, a UCSC graduate student and one of the global organizing committee members. [read more]

GDC 2011 organizers have revealed notable GDC Education Summit talks for the February/March 2011 event, including prestigious speakers from USC, MIT, Parsons and more discussing the state of game education....Advisors for the Summits include Facade co-creator Michael Mateas of the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as the USC School of Cinematic Arts' Tracy Fullerton (Fl0w, The Night Journey) and noted game developer and professor Ian Schreiber. [read more]

Ian Bogost [of Georgia Tech] and Michael Mateas, associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are a few months into a two-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to figure out how to bring video games to the newsroom. [read more]

Team Meat and Gaijin are showcases of innovation and free thinking. But in how many university programs can you see anything like that? How many university programs are exciting like an independent game developer is exciting? I meet with Jim Whitehead [and] Noah Wardrip-Fruin.... These are two of the faculty members tasked with the difficult and very interesting job of teaching students to create for a medium that is still in its infancy. [read more]

Dr. Marilyn Walker of the University of California, Santa Cruz gave a talk on her work on dialogue system adaptation. One of her current projects at UCSC, SpyFeet, is exploring the impact of verbal and nonverbal behavior generation on interactive, outdoor role-playing games. We had a chance to interview Walker about SpyFeet. [read more]

"Removing the physical controller takes away a major piece of context from the experience," said Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he co-directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio, one of the world's largest technical research groups focused on games. [read more]

...Noah Wardrip-Fruin gave a talk on his work mixing humanities and social sciences with computer games. Taking inspiration from research on how middle school-age girls tend to demonstrate a drop off in physical activity.... [read more]

Ph.D. student Ben Weber and EISbot are interviewed in this feature on data mining, machine learning, and game design as part of New Scientist's ongoing coverage of CIG. [read more]

A graduation requirement for seniors in the growing game design program at UC Santa Cruz may become a gateway into the business world for some of the hard-core gaming students looking to design games for PlayStation, Zynga and the iPhone. [read more]

An innovative program at UC Santa Cruz is luring students and professors from all over the country and overseas, and it has nothing to do with the campus' proximity to the beach. [read more]