Gamasutra - Features - "GDC 2003: Academic Summit Wrap-up"


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By Daniel Sanchez-Crespo
Gamasutra
[Author's Bio]
March 7, 2003

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Features

Postcard From GDC 2003: Academic Summit

On March 4-5 at the Game Developer's Conference, a rich blend of game developers and academics gathered together at the Academic Summit, the second annual event focused on establishing relationships between academics and the games development industry. The two-day event, which was organized by the International Game Developer's Association Education Committee (IGDA-EduCom), built on the tradition of last year's seminar, whose main deliverable was the construction of a curriculum framework document. The curriculum (available from the IGDA site at www.igda.org) details the core subjects which academics should be aware of when building game related degrees and diplomas.

This year's academic summit focused not so much on creating documents, but on tackling specific problems and proposing solutions. Thus, lively discussions were held around subjects that are interesting to both the developer and academic communities. Some very interesting case studies were presented, which showcase the many ways industry and academia can collaborate:

A good example of this was presented by a games researcher from the University of Paisley in Scotland, who became an intern for a local game studio, thus getting a first-hand perspective on everyday chores and problems faced by developers.
A group from Electronic Arts explained the employee training programs their company offers to keep employees up to date about the latest industry practices, and explained how universities can work with EA in this and other scenarios.
A completely different success story was the collaboration between Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) and Oxford University. SCEE sponsored several PhD programs that focused on game-related subjects such as facial animation and AI. SCEE benefited by getting quality research at a reasonable cost, while the students got the opportunity to work on a world-class company.
Finally, researchers from the Hong Kong Multimedia and Innovation Centre showcased some game projects which could only be possible at an educational institution, due to their social and ethical component: one exposed war crimes, another showed the intricacies of Kung Fu.

These stories were just a sample of how research can successfully permeate into the games industry, and illustrated that academics need to be more aware of the needs of game developers.

On day two, ten open issues were debated in groups. This year the focus was on practical problems which need to be addressed urgently. Some tables discussed how to attract industry developers into the classrooms, while others discussed how to turn game development into a legitimate career path. Some interesting work dealt with how to structure a games academia and developer data bank, so developers and researchers can quickly find out who is working on what, which research documents are publicly available, or how to get industry veterans to come and share their experience with students at the schools. The focus was extremely pragmatic, so several problems were directly addressed at the meeting room, with volunteers surfacing quickly to take care of the implementation details. We hope to see some progress in these areas, so by this time next year we have converted raw data available on several media and formats into useful information which can further help build bridges between academics, students and developers.

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