Game Design 101

By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 3, 2005 10:21 AM

In Tuesday's edition of Random Access I examined Scotland's plan to offer $175 to every resident to get up to speed on their information technology skills. Today, let's look a little closer to home.

Students across the nation will start returning to colleges and universities later this month, and some at Michigan State University will have the opportunity to take a most unusual course.

"Beginning in September, MSU will give students a chance to study video games and design through its Specialization in Game Design and Development program," the Detroit News reported "'Game development is a very hot industry right now,' said Brian Winn, co-founder of the program and an assistant professor of telecommunications, information studies and media at Michigan State. 'It's an important program for students who want to go into this as a career,' Winn said."

The paper reported that the program comprises 15 credit hours gained over a sequence of four classes on the history and social aspects of video games as well as a primer on game design. It also profiled one of the students:

"Scott Brodie, a MSU junior from Livonia, is hoping to be among the program's first students. His interest in video games began when he was a 6-year-old playing Nintendo games. This summer, 21-year-old Brodie is working at Stardock, a Livonia-based video game design company where he is doing an internship. .... 'It's a definite career field you can go into,' Brodie said. '[Students] have been hoping for a program that deals with our passion.'"

Some of you, like reader Linda C. Perry of Laurel, Md., might expect a little snarkiness on my part about such a course. As Perry wrote in response to my column yesterday, "How about writing about positive things?"

Fear not, Ms. Perry, I can't think of anything negative to say about this. When I was earning tiny paychecks that usually bounced during my first reporting job, it was my punk friends working on video game design who ended up pulling in real money doing something they enjoyed. Kudos to MSU for developing a serious courseload that teaches students the basics of one of the strongest cultural influences in America today.

The New York Times mined Michigan for higher education stories as well, coming up with this dispatch out of Ann Arbor about how parents' biggest concerns about sending their children to school deal with technology:

"At a June orientation briefing for parents at the University of Michigan ... talk turned quickly to technology. Five students had given up their Sunday afternoon to address issues that the fretful parents might have had about sending their children to college -- finding a balance between study and fun, Greek life, campus safety, binge drinking. But many parents had other questions: which operating system is best; is a laptop or desktop preferable; how good is the wireless access; and is it necessary to bring a printer?" the Times reported. "The session's leader, a little desperate, finally asked, 'Does anyone have questions that aren't about technology?'"

Times tech reporter John Schwartz wrote that different schools have rules about PCs that might leave some prehistoric parental units panting to catch up. For example: The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., doesn't offer support for Macs. Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., urges students to bring computers with enough processing power to run on the school's network. Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., will not allow students to use computers running Windows 95 or NT 3.51 systems -- or older ones -- and "strongly discourages" Windows 98 and ME because of concerns about their lack of protection against viruses and evil software.

The article covers various other technologies, but I enjoyed this excerpt, which reminded me of a spirited debate I had with my father in the summer of 1991:

"Ashton Applewhite, a freelance writer in Manhattan, described this conversation with her Indiana-bound son, Luke: 'Mom, what about a TV?' 'Are you kidding me? No way am I paying for a TV.' 'Mom, everybody has TVs!' 'Great! You can discuss that with your future roommates.'"

Yes folks, some things don't change.

Really Simple Streamlining

RSS -- that abbreviation that most people still don't know -- is gaining ground among college students by helping them find information more quickly than they could before. The result? More work for every waking hour -- and according to USA Today, that's how most hours are spent.

"Lilangi Ediriwickrema, 21, peruses summaries of the latest articles about stem cell research. She quickly dismisses the first three articles but pauses on the fourth before clicking to read the entire story," wrote Anh Ly of the Gannett News Service. "Short for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is a way to receive constant updates from news sites, online catalogs and blogs without the laborious process of visiting individual sites, wading through outdated content and managing annoying pop-up ads. ... For Sara Knechtel, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, RSS comes as a relief from the proliferating sea of bogus information on the Web. 'Running searches on Google or Yahoo! will bring back so many irrelevant sources,' Knechtel says. 'There's the issue of making sure the sources you do find are credible.'"

One Way to Avoid P.E.

I never had an aversion to the activities we did in gym class, though I still question my elementary school's emphasis on square dancing, the parachute dance and our compulsory handheld streamer routines performed to the "Flashdance" theme and "Celebrate" by Kool and the Gang .

If only we'd had Internet connections in 1981. That's what I kept thinking as I read this Times piece about online gym:

"Sound like an oxymoron? Not in Minneapolis, where a physical education course joined the school district's growing online catalog in the spring and already has a waiting list," the paper wrote. "'I've never seen a response like this to any course,' said Frank Goodrich, a veteran football coach who is one of two instructors teaching online physical education this summer to about 60 high school students."

The program requires students to "work out hard" for a half-hour four times a week and then check in via e-mail. Parental verification is required.

The Education Department says there were 328,000 student enrollments in public school online courses in the 2002-2003 school year. While gym might sound like an odd course for online study, the Times said today's emphasis on personal fitness makes it a no-sweat decision.

The Times covered high schooler Abbie Modaff: "This summer, Abbie has been training for a triathlon, so she has e-mailed reports on swimming, biking and jogging workouts to her instructor, Tamara Cowan, who is teaching online gym to 31 Minneapolis students this summer from a friend's home in Sacramento. 'When I'm not feeling like I'm about to die, running can be incredibly good,' Ms. Modaff wrote to Ms. Cowan in one workout journal in July."

As for me, I have the Internet thing down just fine. Now it's time to work on the whole physical activity part.

Download on the Farm

U.S. farmers are using computers in larger numbers, but that growth rate is slowing, according to National Statistics Service figures out last Friday. The Associated Press ran a story on this, and provided a look at where the most wired farmers live.

"The nation's most Internet-connected farmers were in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania at 76 percent. Farmers in Western states had high Internet access: Montana at 70 percent, Oregon at 68 percent, Colorado at 65 percent, Idaho at 68 percent and Washington at 65 percent," the AP reported. "The agency also asked farmers for the first time how they accessed the Internet. They found that dial-up was the most common method for 69 percent of those U.S. farms. Roughly 26 percent also said they used the Internet in the past 12 months for nonagricultural business."

Kentucky farmers are the least connected at 30 percent, the wire service said.

A Blog a Second?

"You're kidding, right?" No, folks, I'm quoting.

The BBC cited a report from blog tracking group Technorati, which says these online Web diaries are being created at the rate of one per second.

"In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March," the BBC reported. "It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months."

Bottom line? That's 86,400 new blogs a day that I'll never read.

Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.