WHEN high schoolers say they want to grow up and build video games, Steve Seabolt has a pat response: "You don't get to make video games by playing video games," says the vice president of university and marketing education at Electronic Arts, the world's No. 1 video game maker. "You make video games by studying really, really hard."
These days, students with an interest in video game development have more options than ever to study really, really hard, thanks to a growing number of interactive media programs that bridge the gap between academia and the $25-billion video game industry. Over the past few years, dozens of top-notch colleges and universities have set up gaming labs and forged interdisciplinary programs, offering bachelor's and master's degrees in "integrated media," "game engineering" and "interactive entertainment."
As convergence becomes the predominant trend in media, the same is happening at many schools, which are breaking down barriers to merge formerly segregated disciplines. Among the best programs: Georgia Tech in Atlanta; the University of Central Florida in Orlando, which just unveiled its Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy; Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh, which is co-directed by two professors -- one in computer science, the other in drama; and the University of Southern California, which offers bachelor's and master's degrees in interactive entertainment through its School of Cinema-Television.
Anyone looking for a glimpse into the creative leadership of tomorrow's video games might want to peek inside the gaming lab at USC. What's in the works there bears little resemblance to what's hot now: sports and fantasy titles.
In an upstairs room at the school's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, students in the interactive entertainment MFA program display their works in progress on 15 projection screens ringing the room. Among them are Susana Ruiz's cartoon images for a project based on the 1994 Rwandan genocide and Andrew Sacher's interactive confessional booth for technology addicts.
"Our program thrives on students having multiple passionate backgrounds and they inevitably come up with wacky stuff," says Scott Fisher, chair of the interactive media division, founded in 2002. Last year, the program got a major boost when Electronic Arts, maker of popular sports titles such as Madden NFL and FIFA, donated $8 million to create the EA Game Innovation Lab and develop the interactive entertainment program.
