The Interactive Entertainment Program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts

The project-based curriculum at the USC School of Cinematic Arts offers students an education in design fundamentals, production skills, and leadership in a collaborative, creative environment. The goal of the program is to produce students who have the technical, creative, and critical skills to bring to life the next generation of interactive entertainment.

The “gateway” class for matriculating students is Introduction to Interactive Entertainment, which exposes students to foundational works in game design and gives them critical vocabulary and historical perspective. Additionally, students take introductory cinema courses covering technique, aesthetics, criticism, and social implications of cinema.

The program’s beginning game-design course, Game Design Workshop, introduces students to core concepts such as the analysis of game mechanics, defining player-experience goals, brainstorming and ideation, paper prototyping, playtesting, and the iterative design process. Game Design Workshop treats game design not as technical practice, but as a participatory art form and provokes students’ imaginations with questions about the nature of games, the process of design, and the aesthetics of play.

The beginning game design course is accompanied by an introductory technology class, Programming for Interactivity. This class takes students from various levels of expertise through an exploration of the basics of programming for games. Students are introduced to object-oriented computer programming and complete several small 2D game prototypes by the end of the semester. Like the complementary design class, Programming for Interactivity teaches technology implementation in support of the player experience.

Intermediate and advanced project classes follow this same structure, bringing design and technology closer together in service of the overall experience. In joint projects at the intermediate level and larger teams at the advanced level, students learn to form successful collaborations, to become articulate and skillful team members, and to earn the right to lead others by gaining the respect of their fellow students.

In addition to these core project classes, students round out their game education by taking elective courses in visual arts, interface design, programming, audio, writing, business and management, experimental hardware, mobile technologies, motion capture, and cultural game studies.

It has become clear to us as we have developed and expanded this program that the future growth of the game industry lies in the expansion of the expressive palette of games. Academic institutions can play a part in this evolution of the medium by understanding that the purpose of an education in games is not to train people to fill the ranks of the game industry—though this may be one effect, as it has been with film studies, for example. The purpose of an education in games is to explore the nature of the medium, to learn by practice and by exposure what its potential might be, and to help students to articulate their own unique ideas in this powerful aesthetic form.

Intermediate students test their game prototypes in the state-of-the-art testing lab at USC. Class projects at all levels of instruction go through multiple playtests over the course of development.

As a young designer, I felt threatened by this. Who was this expert? Did he have the authority to change my game? It was with some trepidation that I first met with Kevin Keeker from the Microsoft user research group. Kevin showed up with a dog-eared copy of the spec, a list of questions, and a heuristic evaluation. He had clearly done his homework. The games were in a very early state, and I was hesitant to put them in front of users yet. Like most designers, I felt that if I could just get all of my ideas implemented, the tests would “go better.” Kevin assured me that it was actually better to test early and identify any issues while there was still time to make changes to gameplay. So he created a test plan, and I took the first set of prototypes out to Seattle.

What we found imploded my view of the design process. Things which were completely self-evident to me were lost on the new players. Interface design, clarity of rules, game balance, overall premise—I came back with notes on all of this and more. On the way to the airport, I realized that I wanted to do another set of tests as soon as possible—just as soon as we could implement changes based on this initial feedback. I started thinking about how I might work more tests into the design schedule. What if we started earlier? What if we started with paper models of the gameplay and interface? I had become an addict. I realized that user tests were the way to game-