Applying to Game Companies

“a graduate program for the left and right brain”

Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center has a project based Masters of Entertainment Technology. Their program is aimed mostly at developing games, thugh they define “entertainment technology” widely to include augmented reality, telepresence, and entertainment robotics.
They have a neat page with information on how to prepare applications and demo reels for the entertainment industry, see How To Documents. This is thanks to Paola Borin.

OCLC: Gamers and Boomers

gameboom.jpg The Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC) Newsletter (No. 267) has a set of stories about computer games and the difference between Boomers (born from 1946 to 1964) and Gamers (born after the 1970s). The conver story, The Big Bang! (Tom Storey) notes a shift from boomers who are career-driven, independent and idealistic to gamers who are motivated, resilient, confident and analytical. The story presents gamers as sociable (compared with boomers who are independent), which inverts the usual complaint that gamers are loners.
Thanks to Susan for pointing me to this.
Continue reading OCLC: Gamers and Boomers

NPD Funworld: Tracking and Reporting on Video Game Industry

From an article in the Hamilton Spectator about a new program at McMaster that I am involved in I came across a reference to the NPD Group which does “global sales and marketing information”. They have a section just on the video game industry, see,
NPD Funworld. On the site they have reports that are for sale along with trend information.
There is also an NPD Canada site though it’s not clear when you are seeing reports/information clearly about Canada and when not.
Continue reading NPD Funworld: Tracking and Reporting on Video Game Industry

Ubisoft Campus

I have been trying to track down more about the Ubisoft campus and development studio. Here is a story, Ubisoft, Canadian govt to create “university” from Gamespot. Here is the Ubisoft announcement, Ubisoft – UBISOFT ANNONCE LA CR…ATION D’UN STUDIO DE D…VELOPPEMENT ¿ QU…BEC.
It’s interesting that this news appears on the French version of the site, but not the English!
Continue reading Ubisoft Campus

University of Southern California

The Information Technology Program at The University of Southern California has a number of interesting minors in areas like Game Design and Management, and Game Programming.
Strangely this doesn’t seem to be the area that Electronic Arts donated to. See Game On, from the USC Public Relations about the $8 million gift to the School of Cinema-Television for the interactive media division.

Old story on Silicon Knights

MacLeans has a story from June 11, 2001, titled “Gaming Knights; Canadian creator hope to score off Sony, Nintendo and Micrsoft” by Danylo Hawakeshka. It is on a game company, Silicon Knights, which is based in Saint Catherines, just down the road. Silicon Knights presents itself as organized around a “guild” philosophy which seems drawn from the gaming culture. This is from Kelly.
Continue reading Old story on Silicon Knights

Rotman Panel on the Games Industry

This afternoon I went to an panel at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto on, “Playing with $10 Billion – The Growth and Expanse of the Video Game Industry.” (See BTG Events and Geekstreet.ca.) The individual panel presentations were not that good, but that wasn’t the point, the overall event was a peek into the business of gaming and how it is talked about in business circles. Being at the Rotman, the orientation of the panel was towards computer games as a market. I also don’t think “expanse” is the right word of the panel – nor the word the business students who organized this wanted … perhaps “breadth” was what they meant.

One feature of the presentations was that there was a certain amount of hype about the demographics of the game industry that conflated console blockbuster games with smaller adult games for PCs. They kept on repeating that the average gamer was 29 years old until one of the panelists explained the stat. What worked for me was haveing a representative spread of speakers from Alexander Manu (Industrial Design at OCAD and the head of the Beal Research Centre on Creative Strategy) to industry representatives.

Manu jammed a one hour talk into 15 minutes zipping through slides. What I was left with was an argument for rethinking the interface and gaming to turn interactive arts into an $80 billion business. He called for innovation – getting away from the console blockbuster for boys model and thinking about “extreme playgrounds” that would enable games like Pac-Manhattan. He also had a theory of play and game design that went by too fast for me to comment on.

The other speakers were from the media and industry. Marc Saltzman responded to Manu on innovation arguing that there was innovation and giving some examples. Marc, to be frank, was more interesting in the question period when he tended to gently moderate the views of the two industry people. (Marc made the point the 29 year-old stat was due to all the adult gamers who are playing things like Solitaire or Poker online, not Halo 2.)

Finally there was a rep from Microsoft who spoke about the xbox and one from Ubisoft who talked about their strategy. Ubisoft is investing up to $700 million to expand their workforce by 1,000 employees. They aim to develop not just individual games, but franchises or properties that can be safely iterated with new versions. They expect to come out with 4 new lines a year of which 2 will fail leaving them with 2 new lines (franchises) a year. Both industry reps went to lengths to stress the changing demographics they clearly have to work hard to get taken seriously in business, and there is an interesting paper there – what is being said in order to legitimize computer games as a business? Why is it compared to the film industry?