Building Northeastern U's Game Design Curriculum From Scratch

Terrence Masson, Director of Creative Industries @ Northeastern and Siggraph 2010 Chair, spoke at the Games in Education Summit 2009.

As a producer he appreciates clarity of communication. He saw a funny tag on a piece of luggage at the airport; it said, "No, yours is the other black bag." haha

Terrence's background is similar to my own: animation, visual effects, game development, and commercials. He also does special venues, which sounds very interesting. He used the the ETC as a model and designed his curriculum on the team based environment of "Left / Right brain development."

He still has his 1974 Dungeons & Dragons graph paper! And he shared a photo of himself with Gary Gygax, the creator of D&D, who sadly passed away last year. Terrence was thankful that he did some game design with Gary Gygax. Very cool! Game Design is Terrance's passion. Awesome.

Terrence's 15 minute claim to fame: He helped the South Park creators to build an animation pipeline for their now successful show.

Why create a Game Design program? Some statistics: the 2007 world market for movies was $26.7 billion. The 2007 world market for games? $40 BILLION. That's pretty convincing.

Terrence sits on the advisory committee for Boston's Mayor Menino, who is trying to stimulate the local creative economy with City and State initiatives. (My thoughts: the Mayor's link is an interesting article in Edge magazine, even though some angry game industry-insiders rage against Menino's efforts to address inappropriate video game content.) Terrence explained that 16 game companies came to Boston in the past 2 years. Very cool.

I'm excited for the 2010 Powering Up Boston conference...

At Northeastern, a 10 year program called "Multimedia Studies" has now evolved into the current Creative Industries Program.

He promised his colleagues that he would say "pedagogical." Ripple of laughter in the audience from the educators. Oh... pedagogy means "the principles and methods of instruction. (I think it is much cooler to spell it "paedagogy"; love the 'ae' as a one letter thing...)

Terrence researched over 60+ game design curriculums around the world. He found it is the rare institution that offers a BFA in Game Design. Teaching game design, Terrence stressed the quest for excellence, and how he "scares the crap out of the students." New students are shocked, "This is really hard!" He advocates constant feedback and constant critiques.

Not surprising, Terrence admits that "Today's 18 year olds have abysmal writing skills."

A course in Games in Society is mandatory for all students. The audience loved looking at the slides with course loads for a a typical load of classes for a game design student. Just fascinating.

Class Structure. The admission of 12 kids per class drew wide-eyed stares of envy. (I love watching the crowd during presentations; they really put things in perspective.)

Pitch Structure. Students must create 3 pitches for a game. Each 'elevator pitch' is 30 seconds in length and illustrated on white boards with story thumbnails. Nice!

Capstone Structure. Team based collaboration is key. Projects are created with a range of specialized students from across the university to mimic how games are created in industry; Graphic Design, Music, Art, Psychology, Computer Science + Project Managers.

Coop Program. Students go on coop in their "Middler Years" for two 6-month stints at professional game companies in Boston, New York and Los Angeles. This Coop Program keeps the faculty on the "bleeding edge," Terrence admits, as students return from work and share their experiences with the technology that is being used to make computer games today.

They don't teach tools. I repeat, Northeastern's game design program does not teach tools. They teach 1 credit Tool courses and prepare students for the ever evolving nature of computer tools. Their lab is replaced every 3 years. And best of all? It is all Mac based, currently with Leopard and X Grid servers.

Such a great look into a professional game design program! I can't wait to check in with Terrence this summer and continue this conversation.