Did you know that the gaming industry is larger in revenue than the film industry? I didn’t… And the audience for games is 40% female. This panel included two CS faculty members (Diane Pozefsky from UNC Chapel Hill and Tiffany Barnes from UNC Charlotte) and two professionals in the industry (Colleen McCreary and Lauren Paone from Electronic Arts).
Game development is particularly interesting for women, I think, because of the breadth of challenges and the diversity of folks that you work with. As a researcher, I was particularly excited by hearing Tiffany Barnes from UNC Charlotte talking about all of the areas relevant to gaming. It got me thinking about gaming as both a teaching tool, as well as a really important application in my own research area (ubiquitous computing). Location based games, games that use the computing infrastructure (graffiti based walls, etc), and computer games that are integrated into the physical world are really gaining ground.
Using game development in the curriculum can expose students to some of the hardest problems in Computer Science:
Software engineering… Need effective team process to get this system working. Hard problems!
Game structure and flow, FUN — Need rapid prototyping process to make sure it’s actually fun.
Graphic design, HCI — More realistic looks, lots of research already, and continuing
Graphics, Animation, Physics, Audio — more and more focus in these areas now
Programming Languages — Underlying code in C/C++ but designers will use scripting languages (need C/C++ memory management)
Data Structure, Architecture — Multiple cores, parallelism!
Networks, Game AI — Multiplayer games popular, Game AI is still not very good
I also think that using games as a motivation for teaching software development BEYOND just Java could help bring C/C++ back as a large part of the curriculum.
Angela Dalton
Official GHC 2007 Blogger
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