Majoring in video games

The Thukrals wanted their son, Dhruv, to go into nanotechnology. So when he told them he'd rather be a video game developer he might as well have said he wanted to join the circus.

"Are you serious?" they asked.

He was. The 21-year-old USC graduate student proved it by switching the focus of his computer science doctorate from a field known as distributed systems to video game programming.

He then launched a campaign to convince his parents back home in New Delhi that helping people have fun was not only a legitimate career but also lucrative. He peppered them with articles about the growth of the video game industry, which is expected to generate global revenue of nearly $50 billion this year. He also sent them stock charts and annual reports of some of the industry's top companies.

They relented.

"Awareness is growing, and more students are interested," said Thukral, who in 2004 became one of the inaugural students in USC's graduate program for video game development. "Computer science can be fun."

Game design has helped rekindle interest in computer science and become a hot new major at more than 200 schools across the country, according to the Entertainment Software Assn., a trade group. Because making games crosses several disciplines, the diversity of programs that offer such courses is staggering: Fine arts colleges, engineering schools, film schools, music schools and even drama programs are sending graduates into the fast-growing industry.

"Some programs throw a drama guy together with a programming guy to see what they come up with," said Bing Gordon, a venture capitalist and former chief creative officer for industry powerhouse Electronic Arts Inc. "Games is the ultimate interdisciplinary art."

When video games began to emerge in the late 1970s and early '80s, their creators tended to be computer hobbyists working out of bedrooms and garages.

Now, game companies recruit armies to work in studios all over the world. They invent characters, write dialogue, compose music, create lavish digital scenes and write the software that rules these fantasy worlds. A blockbuster game can require more than 100 developers, each working for two or more years, to complete.

"Just like everything else, universities are about following the money," said Jessie Schell, who teaches game design at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh.