Gaming the System
At Montgomery College, students seek to turn what some see as a frivolous pastime into a serious career

By Eugene L. Meyer
Sunday, August 6, 2006

It's about 8 o'clock on a Monday night in January, break time for the students in Montgomery College's CA190, "Introduction to Game and Simulation Development." Rick Jelly, one of the 18 students in the class, walks out of the computer science building for a smoke. At 45, the blue-collar guy with a trim red beard could be mistaken for a visiting parent. Most of his classmates are 20 years old, give or take a year. They've been raised on video games, the medium that they're studying in this course. Jelly, on the other hand, is decidedly old school.

He spent almost 30 years in the printing business, still smokes menthols and takes the bus to class because he doesn't have a car. He gets by by supplementing a Pell grant with a $7-an-hour, 15-hour-a-week job as a computer lab assistant on the college's Rockville campus.

He knows the world is changing, and he is trying to change with it. If all goes well, he'll receive an associate's degree next year and move on to a four-year college that offers a bachelor's program in game design. Then, he hopes, it's on to a future of earning six figures -- not an unrealistic expectation in the $10 billion-a-year game development industry, where starting annual pay ranges from $40,000 to $60,000.

For jump-starting this dream, Jelly credits Montgomery College, which, he says, "opened my eyes" to the possibility of a career in video game design. And he's not the only one. As computer games have become part of our culture, the process of producing them has found a niche in academia.

Today, hundreds of colleges and universities around the world -- including respected schools such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Southern California -- offer courses and degree programs in computer gaming, as do a growing number of community colleges.

"This began to build about five years ago," explains Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, a Washington-based trade group. "We started to see some universities dedicate programs to people seeking careers in the industry." For today's students, who have "grown up with video games as a core part of their diet," Lowenstein says, "the opportunity to enter careers in the video game industry is as, if not more, attractive than the film sector."

These college courses aren't all fun and games. They take discipline, teamwork and creativity. Many schools have added a focus on "serious gaming," which applies interactive and simulation techniques familiar to family room gamers to less frivolous pursuits. This burgeoning part of the industry is providing job opportunities for game designers and programmers in fields including medicine, military training, education and even dispute resolution. Government and private industry are the major consumers.

"Formal education is becoming more and more important," says Joe Biglin, an executive with BreakAway Games, a top producer of serious games. "We like people with some exposure to a liberal arts curriculum. We have programmers and artists, but also writers and people who do accounting and every kind of job you can think of."

With more than 50 game development companies, the state of Maryland claims to be the East Coast hub of the industry. The largest concentration is in the Baltimore suburb of Hunt Valley, home to BreakAway and industry giant Firaxis Games, whose legendary director of creative development, Sid Meier, conceived the best-selling Civilization series.

ENTER THE COMMUNITY COLLEGES. Montgomery College's gaming program began in 2004, largely at the initiative of assistant professor Deborah Solomon, 36, a former human rights and labor lawyer. Solomon graduated from the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda before going to Brown University. While getting her law degree from Harvard, she found herself playing the shooting game Doom instead of studying for exams. The pastime changed her life.

"I got into Web development. It started as a hobby. I enjoyed it so much -- it was so Zen and peaceful in comparison to suing oil companies -- I decided I was ready for a career change," she says. She held a series of contract jobs in the industry before her mother, who was taking photography classes at Montgomery College, suggested she teach there. Solomon joined the school's computer applications department in January 2002. The first certificates in computer gaming were awarded two years later. By last fall, the college had added an associate's degree in the field. Now, Montgomery students have the option of going on to the University of Baltimore, which offers junior- and senior-level classes culminating in a bachelor's degree in gaming.

This spring, Solomon taught three courses at Montgomery College, including the introductory-level CA190. The class met for nearly four hours on Monday evenings. Students discussed the merits of various games, learned industry jargon and debated ethical issues related to violence and obscenity. They also covered highlights in the history of the industry, from 1958's Tennis for Two, a Pong precursor that was developed for the oscilloscope, to 1980 mega-seller Pac-Man, whose author was inspired after taking a bite out of a pizza, to the present.

Most of Solomon's students are from modest backgrounds, and only one is female. On a class "getting to know you" form, Kelly Renshaw, 20, wrote that she loves "ghosts and paranormal stuff." Her goal is a job with Bethesda Softworks, the Rockville-based company responsible for the award-winning Elder Scrolls fantasy series.

To provide her students with practical experience, Solomon split them into six teams a few sessions into the course. Each team was charged with designing a video game. Every Sunday, Jelly's team would meet online for an hour or so to develop their story line, characters and Web site. Renshaw joined Jelly and Matthew Davis, 19, a Radio Shack salesman.

Back in the classroom, Solomon directed the students to play Pac-Man online, right then. "This is an assignment!" she said, adding, almost as an afterthought: "There's no reason you can't be inventing new genres now. It's not all been done."

JELLY IS NO LUDDITE. One afternoon in May, with no students to assist at the campus Mac lab where he works part time, he has time to sit and reflect on his life.

One of five children, he was far from the best student back in high school. He cut a lot of classes and graduated from Wheaton High School by attending at night. Today, he shares a subsidized six-bedroom home in Rockville with other Section 8 housing recipients, including an electrician, a fast-food worker and a Safeway supermarket employee. He's single, no kids; he has never married. He got his first job in a printing plant while still a teenager, packing and sorting newspapers and small magazines at Comprint Printing in Gaithersburg. (Comprint is now owned by The Washington Post Co.) Eventually, he became a "paster," gluing the paper rolls together so that the presses would flow without interruption.

His next and longest job was at a Rockville bindery. Decades in, Jelly was making $10 an hour, and prospects weren't good. "To make the big money, $20 an hour, you were expected to work the midnight shift," he says. Eventually, he developed back problems he blames on earlier work lifting heavy paper rolls, and, for a while, he did odd jobs.

During the summer of 2003, seeking a career path without heavy lifting, he took a free basic computer course offered by the county. "I went in there not even knowing how to type or click," he says. The eight-week class was held on the Montgomery College campus. After it ended, Jelly says, he found out he qualified for student aid and enrolled there that fall, starting with an introductory course on desktop publishing. He became a full-time student in the fall of 2004. A class in animation software led him to game development.

He earned a certificate in electronic imaging last year and is on track to a bachelor's degree. For someone who never clicked a mouse until he was 40, Jelly has now played plenty of games: Hardwood Hearts, Laura Croft Tomb Raider, Hoyle Card Games 2005 are among his favorites. Solomon requires her students to blog regularly -- writing about what audio impressed them, what games made them feel emotion -- and, of all of them, Jelly blogs the most. ("Quite a few of us 40-plus age group are into the classic-style games, rather than the multi-level massive RPGs [role-playing games] and some very extensive adventure games," he notes in one blog.) What's next? "Endless possibilities," he says, invoking Montgomery College's mantra. "All of a sudden, life is here."

ON A SUNNY MONDAY IN MAY, the students in CA190 are being graded on a class play in lieu of a final exam, because the factors that go into putting on a play -- creativity, teamwork, character and story-line development, costumes and setting -- are vital to good gaming, too. In the amphitheater outside the humanities building, Solomon's students dress up as characters in the classic Nintendo game, the Legend of Zelda, and act out its simple plot: Link, a young boy, attempts to rescue Princess Zelda (Kelly Renshaw plays Zelda) from the evil Ganon. The half-hour play is the centerpiece of the school's second annual Game Expo Day, which includes speakers from Bethesda Softworks, BreakAway Games and the University of Baltimore.

For the Zelda production, Jelly arrives early to set up the audio system. Then, he and others use duct tape to assemble a five-foot high cardboard castle. Eventually, about 50 people settle onto the amphitheater's benches. The players have spent an hour in makeup, and now it's showtime.

Link and Ganon battle with toy swords until Link, dressed like Robin Hood with elf ears, slays the villain and frees Zelda. Jelly becomes the head moblin, a bad guy with a Redskins Hog-style nose affixed to his face. But he gets in only a few whacks at Link. Ganon falls into the cardboard castle, which collapses, an unplanned touch of reality.

The play over, students file past a table with cookies, cheese and crackers, and giveaway water bottles emblazoned with www.studygaming.com. In a small, packed classroom, they hear from Kathleen Harmeyer, who runs the University of Baltimore's computer gaming program. She promises full scholarships to community college graduates with a 3.5 grade-point average.

A few of the CA190 students listen intently, but most are elsewhere, either having makeup removed or deconstructing Zelda, literally. Jelly is one of those, working with three others to dismantle the castle. Not enough people were helping, he explains, and, "Somebody's got to step up to the plate."

THERE IS GOOD NEWS at the last meeting of CA190. Bethesda Softworks has contacted six students about summer jobs. Two so far have been hired, including Renshaw.

Solomon is also proud to announce that 12 of her students in a more advanced class (IS195 -- "Building Game Worlds") have won the $2,500 second-place prize in the University of Southern California's "Re-inventing Public Diplomacy Through Games" contest. Their game, Hydro Hijinks, has players resolving disputes over water rights. Solomon hopes this success will inspire her CA190 charges as they seek to enter the field. Finally, the teams present the games they have designed. One, called Underground, is a high-stakes poker game that involves eluding the police; Black Flag Pirates is all ship raids and treasure hunting; poison gas, snipers and other World War I pitfalls threaten the soldiers in the Great War; and, in Knowledge Quest, an evil chemist promotes illiteracy. Robot Invasion pretty much describes itself.

Jelly's team presents Haunting Sam, in which a ghost tries to solve his or her own murder. His team has created a Web site ("This Puzzle/Horror game will thrill and amaze you with its Dazzling Graphics and Gripping story. Pre-Order today for a free Haunting Sam Poster!"), a sleeve cover and 30 pages of rules.

A few weeks later, Jelly is not exactly riding off into the digital sunset. His summer job isn't testing computer games -- or anything even close. He's at the college's continuing education office, working at the front desk, "assisting the lady that does the payroll." It's customer service, summer work devoid of glamour. But Jelly isn't worried about his future. He aced the course.

Eugene L. Meyer , a former Washington Post reporter, is a freelance writer who lives in

Silver Spring.