With the technology sector in a protracted tailspin, it might seem an inopportune time for Bristol Community College to add to its computer curriculum.
But the Fall River school is introducing a certification program in the one segment of the industry that actually is growing – booming, in fact: computer games. In recent weeks BCC began enrolling students in what will be one of only a small handful of game-development programs in the country when classes start this fall.
“We’ll be filling a need for the fastest-growing segment of the IT field,” said Mike Vieira, acting assistant dean for the Division of Business and Information Management.
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Indeed, the video game industry continues to grow at a torrid pace, eclipsing the movie industry for the first time in 2002. The Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association estimates that the industry’s sales grew 20 percent last year to more than $10 billion, vs. $9.4 billion in Hollywood box-office receipts.
Despite its rapid growth, there is still a frontier feel to the industry, and a relative void of college programs dedicated specifically to electronic-game development.
Students in the new BCC program will earn their certification over two semesters and 27 total credits. The first semester will introduce them to fundamentals of electronic-game production: visual concepts, basic computer programming, and “level building,” or the nuts and bolts of how a video game progresses.
The meat of the program comes in the second semester, when teams of students will create their own computer games. Students will specialize in their area of interest: Artists, for example, will do 3-D modeling and animation; programmers will crunch the underlying computer codes; and game-play designers will serve as the creative visionaries.
Along with their certification, each student should take with them a computer game, saved to a disk, to show off to prospective employers – an interactive portfolio of sorts.
“The most valuable thing they’ll take away is this working game that they’ve helped develop,” said Fred Galpern, who developed most of the curriculum for the program and will teach most of the courses. “In the end, that’s what these companies really care about: Can you help us create great games?”
The would-be game developers could find a fertile job market. The video game industry is expected to approach 150,000 jobs in 2003 – triple that of just five years ago, according to a January issue of Computer User magazine.
The magazine also cited Massachusetts as a hotbed for game design, along with California, Washington and Texas. Galpern, who once worked at a Cambridge game designer, estimates there are roughly two dozen small, independent game companies in Greater Boston.
Given the splintered nature of the game-development field, salary statistics are hard to come by. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, released a report in 2000 that said annual salaries for game designers ranged from $35,000 to $70,000. A survey at the 1999 Game Developer conference found that 3-D artists with at least a year of experience earned an average of nearly $60,000.
The industry is, however, notoriously hard to break into, thanks to cutthroat competition. And although it has fared better than other segments of the computer industry, it has not been immune to layoffs and hiring freezes, according to a story last year in Game Developer magazine.
Galpern, an animator and illustrator, recently became the art manager at Blue Fang Games, an electronic-game developer in Waltham, Mass. He also spent some time in Hasbro’s interactive division before it was sold in 2001 to a French video-game maker.
Galpern equates the new BCC program’s curriculum to that of an art school, in which first-year students would be expected to learn a bit of sculpting, sketching, painting and art history. Similarly, the game-design certification will offer a smattering of computer programming, graphic design, animation – and yes, video-game history (although it only dates back about 20 years).
The art-school analogy is not a random one. With the dearth of training programs, the video-game industry draws much of its talent from art and design schools.
“We typically hire 3-D modelers and animators with tons of traditional art skills, but who don’t know anything about making a game,” said Ryan Lesser, the art director at Harmonix Music Systems Inc., a Cambridge company that makes games for Sony’s hugely popular PlayStation 2.
Lesser is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught animation at RISD for several years. He said artists and graphic designers often learn the basics of digital game design on the job – with varying degrees of success.
Animators, for example, typically learn the ropes within weeks, while it might take 3-D modelers more than a year.
Lesser said it was only a matter of time before schools awoke to the potential that the electronic-games industry holds for students. It is a realm that colleges and universities have been slow to embrace, he said.
“I think schools are finally starting to realize that making games is not a frivolous thing,” Lesser said. “Now that the industry is making as much money as Hollywood, everyone needs to pay attention to video games. I’m psyched to see community colleges all the way up to private art schools thinking about game programs.”
BCC is not alone. Two of the country’s better-known game-design programs are the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash., and Full Sail University in Winter Park, Fla. And the Art Institute of California – San Diego began a new video-game degree program in January, joining nine other similar programs at Art Institute schools around the country.
But there are few, if any, programs in New England dedicated specifically to game development, and BCC administrators are bracing for an enrollment surge.
“I think it will go crazy,” Vieira said. “The folks who grew up with handheld games and TV games like Atari have moved onto the computer. There’s now this whole sub-culture of gamers who I think would be interested in a program like this.”
The college expects to enroll 40 students in the program, about half in a fast-track, which would include four classes a week, and the other half in a slow track of one to two classes a week.
Priscilla Grocer, chairwoman of the Computer Information Systems department at Bristol, said the proximity of game companies in Boston and Cambridge bodes well for the certification program. And, with their knowledge in hand, students could go off to create games on their own.
“Game development still is very much a cottage industry; a lot of development is done off hours, in your basement,” Grocer said.
She said the certification could be expanded to a full-fledged degree program
if it takes off.
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