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lack a conceptual core — something upon which to fall back when those platforms become irrelevant and those toolsets outdated.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.

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel,” writes Zinn. Liszkiewicz points to Farmville, that scourge of networks, and sees some very successful little cogs.

Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. Most any concerned parent might say, “Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money….”[1] So said Roger Caillois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Caillois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of “escape from responsibility and routine.”[2] For Caillois, as for Aristotle, games are in fact essential to citizenship: they allow us to refresh and renew ourselves, help to socialize us, and afford us opportunities to cultivate our imaginations and reasoning skills.[3]

While it will not be the sole topic of interest to Arcade Theory in the fall, the politics of the procedural will figure prominently in our conversations. So take a look at Liszkiewicz’s talk, and spend some time lingering over some of his recent digital poetry, Count As One.

And then, if you’re interested, read more about CCTP 628, Arcade Theory. Be sure not to miss the latest addition, a suggested summer reading list of ready-to-print essays and articles (nothing too heavy, I assure you).

And like a Bruno Bozzetto short, this promo is unmistakably Italian. Indeed, I think that my reaction to this video is not unlike that of La Gioconda herself: In the right light, you might believe that you saw on my face the barest trace of divertimento. But you cannot be sure: For the most part, I am ambivalent and unmoved.

Budget Hero tries to bring a level of clarity and simplicity to the federal budget. It is bound to be controversial since the game puts numbers against issues like bringing home troops from Iraq soon or gradually or not at all and providing options on taxes, Social Security and Medicare. American Public Media worked closely with the Congressional Budget Office, GAO and others on the data and devoted months of reporter and researcher time to creating the game. (via BoingBoing)

The “serious games” advocates will want to believe that Pres. Obama has decided to solve our budget woes by crowdsourcing them. But simulations are simplifications, so an effective — and broadly approachable — budget-balancing simulation is not going to create real “budget heroes.” So it’s worth wondering: Given that most of the country believes that the Government is now taxing them more heavily than ever — despite the fact that taxes are actually lower this year for most of us — is the Administration hoping to leverage game technology in order to demonstrate policy procedurally?

Just remember, guys, if you’re hoping to reach the nation’s early-adopters: iPads won’t do Flash.

In short, Calabouço Tétrico demonstrates how narrative can overdetermine the mechanics of gameplay — no matter how familiar those mechanics may be:  As Tetris becomes a dark exercise in body stacking, the pleasure of closure that should come with every completed row quickly dissipates.

Like editorial games should, [Raid Gaza] takes a strong position. But unlike so many, it also offers coherent gameplay that is related to the conflict it critiques.

His insights here are typically acute, and deserve to be read. But I have reservations about the strong position Bogost himself takes with respect to the emptiness of what he calls “tabloid” games.

“Indeed, newsgames produced very rapidly, like the many small ones about the recent George W. Bush shoe throwing incident, risk becoming tabloid games, little meaningless pointers that commemorate an event only to draw attention to it rather than to comment upon it. These games often capitalize rhetorically: the payload of a game about throwing a shoe at President Bush is the very idea of a game about such a thing, rather than any kind of commentary on the event or its meaning.”

On his watercoolergames blog, Bogost points to one such game, Gaza Defender, with disdain.

I’ve just been made aware of another game on this topic, Gaza Defender. The player is asked to “Defend The Gaza Strip from the Zionist Bombs using your AK-47.” It’s less remarkable as a game and no more thoughtful a commentary than the many whack-a-mole clone newsgames we’ve seen in the past.

Implicit in his Bogost’s dismissal of this thought-less genre of games, of course, is his faith in the advent of a procedural literacy: A savoir-lire among the people. Bogost is worried that, disconnected from any representative or simulative engagement with the world they portray, whack-a-mole clones—tabloid games—don’t provide the opportunity for any kind of critical response in the player. As games, he therefore deems them devoid of value.

the advent of a new technology and its attendant rhetorics does not require the ouster of everything that came before.

But the advent of a new technology and its attendant rhetorics does not require the ouster of everything that came before. The advent of the written word did not require us to abandon orality. Instead, the two technics became imbricated in our every signification. Bogost’s critique of Gaza Defender is unnecessarily dismissive, and ignores the fact that the game is still a political text, in spite of the quality of gameplay.

I think it a mistake, for example, to extract the game itself from the context in which it is presented. The game itself is embedded on a page that features maps depicting (one) history of the Palestinian / Israeli conflict; a link to a Donations page at the Red Crescent website; a link to download Adobe Flash; an embedded stream of music from a Palestinian musician, Mawaal Al Quds. The page includes a tool to share or bookmark the page via any number of well-known social networking sites. This is more than a whack-a-mole clone.

Admittedly, a simple shoe-throwing game may not take advantage of the complexities of the simulative, and it may not be a sophisticated form of “procedural rhetoric.” But it is a voice that asks to be heard.

What’s more, I find myself drawn again to what M. Badiou says about theater: We go not to be cultivated, but to be struck. “Theater-ideas” are experiential, not necessarily critical-intellectual. Are we certain that there no value in arming a player with a shoe and saying, “let fly”?

The facility, which opened in August, is the first of its kind. It replaces five smaller recruitment stations in the Philadelphia area, at about the same annual operating cost, not counting the initial expenses, said Maj. Larry Dillard, the program manager. Philadelphia has been a particularly difficult area for recruitment.

Of particular interest is the Army’s recognition (already noted by scholars like Ian Bogost) that the persuasive capacity of video games extends beyond mere recruitment needs. Games are a more subtle political tool:

“We want to put people in the Army, but that’s about our third priority,” Sergeant Jennings said, gesturing to a kiosk with descriptions of 179 jobs in the Army, including details on salaries and benefits. “Most people think joining the Army means being a grunt, and that Iraq equals death. We try to show them that there’s more to the Army than carrying a gun. If people come in here and they learn that but they don’t join, that’s O.K.”

Read the entire article.