Via GamePolitics, news that the new-ish Game Design BFA offered at GMU has met with“overwhelming” student response.

A story in the Fairfax Times reports that the school has already enrolled around 200 students into the program, besting an internal goal of having 110 students in the program by 2012. As Scott M. Martin, Assistant Dean for Technology, Research and Advancement at the school stated, ‘We’ve been overwhelmed. Our anticipated enrollment for the fall is 500 percent higher than we expected.’

One of US News and World Report’s top “Up and Coming” national universities, GMU has an especially solid reputation in all sorts of tech-oriented studies. In particular, their Center for History of New Media is giving important thought to bettering our digital future (even though they now must do that thinking without Roy).

So a Game Design degree at George Mason makes some sense. Bioware Mythic (owned, like everyone else, by EA Games) is right next door: Their studio is responsible for a number of world-class MMO’s, including Warhammer Online. Bethesda Softworks, developers of Fallout 3 — and CEO’d, curiously, by Wonder Woman’s husband — is just over the Potomac and to the north of GMU. And AOL — current host to a sizable collection of extremely popular, if uninspiring, online games, but at one time a real hub of innovation — is just a scenic bike ride to the north.

Still, I am filled with misgivings about a degree like this. Others have weighed in on this issue at some length, generally citing a concern that by training undergraduates exclusively on contemporary platforms with of-the-moment toolsets, the students who emerge from BFA game design programs will lack a conceptual core — something upon which to fall back when those platforms become irrelevant and those toolsets outdated.

That makes some sense to me, but I see a different danger. Most significantly, I worry that for this generation of codeworkers, we are framing game and simulation design exclusively as the province of creative expression and technical achievement, rather than understanding them as inherently political forms of techne.

Case in point. When GamePro magazine presented Princeton Review’s wrap-up of the top 8 game schools in the United States, this is the way they summarized the growth of interest in game design programs:

Time was to be a game designer, all you needed was a computer and a basement or garage owned by your mother. The only education you needed to be a truly great game designer was a stack of Atari 2600 games and maybe a few issues of Popular Science magazine. Those days are done.

If you want to be a game designer in the maturing market we have today, you need a lot more than your mom’s basement and some magazines. You need imagination, determination, and preferably a job with a major game publisher or an indie game developer. And before you can have any of those things, you just might need a formal education.

Intense personal experience and ambitions to engage with the market; imagination, determination, and an “in” with a publisher: These might also describe those qualities required to start a band or make it as a comic book artist. “Formal education” as I read it here does not signify a critical-analytical liberal arts background, but instead stands roughly to large-scale corporations (i.e., EA) as a guarantor of employee quality and uniformity. Is the candidate familiar with the conventions of code documentation? Does she understand the difference between a class and an object? Does he know understand the premise of Software Quality Assurance?

Look: There’s little doubt that students from GMU will find ample employ in the industry when they graduate. That job market is only going to expand (although I’m not sure that it will expand on American soil). But while a BFA is implicitly about expression and craft, those jobs are unlikely to be about either: Programming at giant corporations like Mythic or BioWare is increasingly compartmentalized and institutionalized. There’s frequently little about the everyday tasks of a low-level Programmer to distinguish “game programming” from, say, “accounting software programming” or “warehouse inventory programming.”

But, at the end of the day, there is an opportunity cost here that I really worry about. There’s no doubt that many of the young people who enter GMU’s program will be brilliant, but how much effort is being devoted to the development of critical thinking skills? We’re busy teaching American Studies majors to think critically, but I imagine that few of them will be involved in building next-generation interfaces or scripting online reputation systems or administering community governance databases.

It seems to me that we need at least to find ways of integrating the critical-analytical conventions of a liberal arts degree with a Game Design BFA. We need to be worrying about procedural literacies; about the anthropology of gaming; about sacrality and the ludic; about the politics of simulation. We need to ask: What kinds of worlds are you building? For whom? And to what end?

You can read (a little bit) more about the program, as well as see a list of course requirements. And — my anxieties and misgivings aside — good luck to the new Program and everyone involved.