USC Toys With Adding Video Game Minors

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USC Toys With Adding Video Game Minors

By MICHAEL THURESSON

Staff Reporter

The halls of academia are quaking there’s a movement afoot at USC to make video games a minor.

Video game development, to be exact, and it’s still not official. A university committee will meet on Dec. 17 to review a proposal from the engineering school’s information technology program that seeks to add five new video game courses to the undergraduate curriculum.

The nine-member committee, comprised of faculty from various undergraduate schools and an undergraduate student, will assess the proposal. If it passes majority vote, a university policy committee would likely give the final go ahead.

“It was never viewed as a serious topic,” said Anthony Borquez, director of the Information Technology Program at the engineering school, who failed at a similar attempt several years ago.

But with sales of videogame hardware, software and accessories expected to exceed the $10.3 billion posted in 2002, it has become a serious topic.

Job growth in the video game industry remains one of the few bright spots for undergraduates with technology degrees. Salaries for programmers are averaging more than $60,000, according to the gaming publication Gamasutra, and the L.A. market has become an employment hotbed.

The University of Southern California has been adding courses over the last few years as the industry has grown to rival the size of the movie industry.

The proposed minors, Video Game Design and Management and Video Game Programming, would have courses focusing on the design of multiplayer games, games for mobile devices, advanced game programming, 3-D modeling and animation. Some of the classes would be offered by the School of Cinema-Television. The classes will be taught by instructors with ties to Electronic Arts and Activision.

The committee must make its decision by the end of January in order for the new curriculum to be implemented for the start of the 2004 academic year. Other universities have incorporated videogame classes into their existing curriculum in recent years, including the University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

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