Or how about one company’s offer to buy the intellectual property behind 16 iPhone games developed at GamePipe for $30,000 each? Compare that to work-study wages. “There’s an amazing amount of intellectual property coming out of the lab,” Zyda says. So great are the opportunities that a big group of recent GamePipe grads decided to skip the lucrative job market. The 15 alums founded Happynin Games, one of a few companies making 3-D games for the iPhone. Their first game, fowlplay, shipped at the end of February. Designed by Andrea Tseng ’09, a graduate of USC Viterbi’s industrial and systems engineering program, and Henry Liu ’09, an Interactive Media Division graduate who also served on the team for Reflection, the game play turns on a flying pigeon’s natural emissions. Stifle your chuckle, reader. For Liu, that pigeon is the goose that laid the golden egg. “iPhone development has caught the students’ eye,” says Zyda with more than a little understatement. Like games on any other platform, mobile games also hold potential for improving people’s lives. Interactive Media Division MFA student Erin Reynolds ’06 (who earned her B.A. in fine arts at USC’s Roski School) worked with faculty members Zyda, Marientina Gotsis of the Interactive Media
wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. So he did what he always does to gauge the direction of gaming: He asked his students. Sumeet Jakatdar MS ’07, now the AI specialist on Call of Duty, told him to go for it. So did Dhruv Thukral MS ’06, now a senior developer at EA Mobile. The two became Zyda’s first teaching assistants for the class, which was immediately oversubscribed. Later, Jakatdar came back to hire six more developers. It is important to realize that this moment of opportunity may not last. Not too long ago, all gaming was console-driven, and young developers lacked the large teams and large purses required to make new games. In a year or two, if portable tablets such as the Apple iPad take off, large teams and large purses again will be required to make the most of the tablets’ capabilities. But for now, says Zyda, “a couple of people in a garage can ship a mobile game.” Just like two now-famous Steves in Silicon Valley and their first desktop computer. Even those USC gaming students who don’t graduate with a published game and a new company to lead still will depart with what the Interactive Media Division’s Chris Swain calls “a foundation in creative leadership,” and an ability to work well in teams, both of which he believes are requirements for any game curriculum.
PAUL DEBEVEC OF ICT’S Graphics Lab is doing things in visual and animation technologies that must be seen to be believed. Or, rather, seen to have your sense of disbelief thoroughly suspended. Division and Maryalice Jordan-Marsh of the USC School of Social Work, with funding from the Humana Innovation Center, to develop a set of health-geared games. The iPhone game in the set, Entréainer, helps match a player’s food cravings with healthy choices in his or her immediate neighborhood. Another game, designed for PCs, challenges children to do exercises and make good nutritional choices to advance the wellbeing of their Pokemon-like creatures. “What we do here affects millions of people, not hundreds,” says Zyda. When Motorola first approached Zyda with an offer of $100,000 to teach a class in game development for cell phones, he
collaboration is the educational leitmotif on the University Park campus, it’s certainly daily business at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), headquartered a few miles away in Marina del Rey. Until recent years, many of ICT’s inventions have existed only in the realm of science fiction. Cliché perhaps, but at ICT, quite true. Paul Debevec of ICT’s Graphics Lab is doing things in visual and animation technologies that must be seen to be believed. Or, rather, seen to have your sense of disbelief thoroughly suspended. Debevec, in collaboration with Image Metrics, has created a demonstration of such technology
IF INNOVATIVE
game design and management. For more artistically inclined undergraduates, the USC Roski School of Fine Arts offers minors in 2-D art for games, 3-D art for games and 3-D animation. Other schools, such as the USC Thornton School of Music and the USC Marshall School of Business, offer specialized courses geared toward the game industry. Across USC, there are now hundreds of students enrolled in game-design degree programs, and the academic catalogue features dozens of courses dealing with various aspects of game design. RESEARCH Today the Game Innovation Lab has more than $1.5 million in sponsored research, including an NEA grant for a “spiritual journey” game designed in collaboration with media artist Bill Viola, and a U.S. Department of Education grant to develop a new generation of math games. Other partners include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Sesame Workshop, Sony, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. Before there were game labs at USC, there was the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). Established in 1999 with a multi-year contract from the U.S. Army, ICT had the mandate of exploring a powerful question: What would happen if leading technologists in artificial intelligence, graphics and immersion joined forces with the creative talents of Hollywood and the game industry? The answer is a host of engaging, memorable interactive media that are revolutionizing the fields of training, education and beyond. While ICT is a research unit that does not grant degrees or offer courses, it runs a summer internship program that accepts 35 students. During the year it employs another 30 graduate research assistants, visiting student researchers and undergraduate student workers. For more information about ICT and to view some of its immersive technologies, go to http://ict.usc.edu Continued on page 51
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