By John Gaudiosi

Twenty years ago, a very smart college kid named Tim Sweeney started releasing Shareware games that he made at his mom’s house. And at the 2012 D.I.C.E. Summit (i.e., Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) in Las Vegas, Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Sweeney, who has been at the forefront of pushing technology forward with Unreal Engine 3, talks about how advances in processing power will continue to advance games. 

We are computing in the past. Every chipset and microprocessor we use today is the product of five to 10 years of development and design. For a technology company to be successful, it must be able to not only deliver cutting-edge products, but also tailor those products for a marketplace and consumer demand that doesn’t yet necessarily exist. It’s enough to make you want to break out the crystal ball. By Stu Horvath

 

 

By John Gaudiosi

With over 11 million subscribers worldwide, Blizzard Entertainment keeps online gamers coming back for more World of Warcraft (WoW) by consistently adding to the virtual world of Azeroth. Cataclysm is the most ambitious expansion to date for the massively multiplayer online (MMO) fantasy role-playing game. While most of the attention has been focused on the new 3D facelift that the game has undergone, Cataclysm is pushing the linear aspect of interactive entertainment forward with its Hollywood-inspired, in-game cinematics.

Recently, I was featured in a prominent publication in an article about PC gaming. What I’m reminded of is how easy it is to be taken out of context -- for right or wrong.

The article was well-written and I stand by most of what I’m quoted as saying. A few things, however, were lost in translation. It’s easy to forget that the people listening to me may not also share my viewpoints, convictions, experiences or vantage point, and therefore, it’s all too easy to be misinterpreted.

By Tracey John

As more and more schools around the globe offer game-design degrees, wannabe game makers have a variety of programs to choose from. Many schools offer vocational programs, but nowadays the academic and creative aspects of game design are also coming into play. Here, we take a look at the Game Center at New York University, one of the newest game design programs that take the latter approach.

Whether you’re developing a new game or have an existing game that you want to port to the netbook platform, it’s important to know how to optimize it. The netbook market is growing steadily and creating new opportunities for game developers on this mobile platform. According to a 2009 report from the NPD Group, nearly 40 million netbooks have shipped so far, and around 139 million are projected to be shipped by 2013.

The best way to show you how to optimize your game for netbooks is to describe what we did when creating a demo for Fireflies. It’s a great example of the easy optimizations and quick performance gains you can achieve when developing games for this fast-growing market.

By Brian Taylor

Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center was founded in 1999 by drama and arts management professor Don Marinelli and the late Randy Pausch, professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design. An independent center housed in neither the School of Computer Science nor the College of Fine Arts, the Entertainment Technology Center is headquartered in a riverfront technology park along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, Penn., directly across from an old steel mill site that is now a mixed-use commercial-residential development designed to blend into the adjacent National Historic District. Its hallways are a pop-culture explosion (geek skewing sci-fi, where a life-size carbonite Han Solo statue leans next to Lara Palmer’s image hanging on a wall above a Blade Runner poster), the men’s room decorated in a Super Mario Brothers World 1-1 motif.

By Tracey John

Although video games have been around for decades, if you want to go about making games for a living, the paths to doing so aren’t readily laid out for you. Fortunately, more and more universities and colleges are now offering courses and degrees focused on game design. Here, we give an overview of some of the different game design programs across the country, as well as what skills, materials and advice students need to get properly schooled for a career in the games industry.

By Matt Ployhar

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the economic impact of video games and why it’s in the country’s best interest to have a bright gaming future. While there are several conversations over the past few years that have corroborated my position, nothing has hit home harder than a discussion I recently had with a major university that prides itself on its technology focus.

One of the top three Chinese game ISVs (independent software vendors) proposed opening a branch of this university in their country. While this is probably a good idea on the surface, I do wonder what the long-term cause and effect is. Eight of the top 10 companies shipping PC games in the world have already shifted to China or South Korea.

The full economic impact of this has barely begun to be felt. Would it really be a good thing to see what little expertise we have left migrate abroad? Can we afford to offshore and outsource math and science skills (algorithms, graphics APIs, physics, AI)?

By Stu Horvath

Innovation takes many forms within the gaming space, often beginning with insight and inspiration from a single person, be they a game developer, an engineer, a sociologist or anything else within the industry. That’s why we’re tracking down thought leaders: to give you a sneak peek of the digital arts future through their eyes.

In this installment, we talk to Michael Mateas, associate professor of computer science at University of California, Santa Cruz, about the intersection of artificial intelligence, art and design -- and its impact on the future of technology.