Taking the Controllers

"These kids here grew up with video games," adds Woodruff, preparing some of the handouts for class, "and they need to have a say as to what the industry will evolve to."

The D.C. academy is one of three the three men started this year. The Baltimore academy ended last month; the Atlanta academy starts next month. In the course of the four-hour class, which meets Fridays, Armstrong is excitable, quick on his feet, with an expansive, full-throated baritone voice. "If you don't remember Pong," he says when no one seemed to recall last week's lesson on the history of video games, "we will sit you here for an hour and make you play Pong." Then he invites six students to play a game he calls Human Pong. Two students on each side act as the walls. A girl with big silver hoop earrings acts as the ball. A boy in an oversize blue T-shirt acts as the player. "Understand that this is all physics," he emphasizes.

Throughout the class, he challenges them to ask: Who's making the games? What are they trying to say?

"What is being put out there? Sports games. Violent games. What do these titles mean?" Armstrong asks, holding up a copy of the Xbox game NBA Ballers, with New York Knicks star Stephon Marbury on the front cover "in diamond earrings bigger than his head," wearing a plush track suit and dribbling a ball. Minutes later, Armstrong takes issue with another game. "Anyone here heard of 25 to Life?" The first-person-shooter game, pitting cops against gangsters, is set for an October release. "Who's the lead? What's the plot? What's the story line?"

What takes up most of the class's time, though, is the actual learning of game design, the computer science, the graphic art, behind it all. With some oohing and aahing -- and, yes, a little groaning and moaning -- students plow through Maya, design software used by many video game developers. Before they talk about story lines, characters and design, however, they first learn to make a ball. How to animate it. Make it bounce. Get it to jump through a ring of fire.

"Why is my ball so small?" Melanie Simpson, 14, a girl in a tight ponytail, asks her friend Tameika Washington, 16.

"Check your radius," she replies.

Woodruff, the formal father figure in the room, makes the rounds, visiting students. "Hold down the alt key," Woodruff tells Simpson and Washington. "That's how you zoom in and out."

Forty-five minutes later, with a few minutes left in class, the students are in a telephone conference call with Mike Chubb, a 27-year-old artist for Sony Online Entertainment, with Armstrong facilitating the conversation. Chubb is in a car shop in San Diego, getting an oil change. A graduate of the Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg, Chubb was featured, with a photograph big enough for an Us Weekly cover, in last month's issue of Black Enterprise magazine. He was hailed as "one of the relatively few African Americans" who are making headway in the gaming industry.

The students ask him: What's your day like? ("Can be long but always fun.") What kind of software do you use to make games? (He, too, uses Maya.) What kind of car do you drive? ("No comment.") Chubb, as it happens, was one of the respondents in the IGDA's demographic survey. "I'm a little bit surprised at how low that is," he says upon learning that 2.5 percent of the 2,000 respondents are black. "I thought it'd be at least 5 percent.

"Granted it's only a cross section of a couple of thousand folks, but that's still an accurate picture of the industry. The industry is young -- so young if you compare it to the music business or Hollywood," Chubb goes on. "Only time will tell what will happen when blacks and Latinos start getting behind the scenes. When they start designing and programming and producing games in better numbers, what kind of stories will they tell?"

On the way home, a few minutes past noon, Martin continues to explain the idea he and his friend have for a video game, tentatively titled Love Curse. She's a half-breed -- her mother a human, her father a demon. He's a human. They fight in the beginning. They fall in love toward the end.

The music in the game will be "rock-and-roll and heavy metal sometimes," and other times "that hip-hop and R&B mix sound that Mariah Carey has," but not exactly Mariah Carey "because some people don't like her so much." The game's look will be cutting-edge, way out there, "a video game masterpiece."

The game's characters, says Martin, will be whites and blacks and Latinos and Asians.