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Gaming & Virtual World Technologies
Just Ask the Avatar in the Front Row
5/1/2007
Colleges and universities head into virtual worlds, and student learning and psychology are changed forever.
MITCH GITELMAN’S PRETTY EXCITED ABOUT MICROSOFT’S
SHADOWRUN. It’s a “first-person shooter” game
that’s team-based, he says: It’s played online with friends, using either Windows
Vista or Xbox 360, and transports the players into a virtual future. In
fact, Shadowrun takes place in 2030—when magic returns to the world—and includes elves,
dwarves, orks, trolls, and humans, all sporting a variety of weapons and ammunition. The
game is due out in spring 2007, and Gitelman can’t wait; he is, after all, its lead designer.
Still, being studio manager of FASA Studio (one of the Microsoft game studios) isn’t what it used to be. For one thing, Gitelman’s previous team was intimate, at 35 people. Now it’s over 100 strong, including artists, game developers, game designers, program managers, testers, and audio specialists. For another, the games themselves are becoming increasingly complex. Gitelman says that the video resolution has tripled in the past several years, and where it used to take a week to conceptualize and reproduce a character, it now takes four weeks. The whole process, from beginning to end, takes about three years.
“My assignment,” says the game inventor, “is to produce a triple-A-quality game. This is a hit-driven business, so each game has to be designed to be a blockbuster. And in order to create content that looks more and more like a movie, it takes more and more people.” Consumer expectation has risen accordingly, he notes.
Attracting (and Channeling) the Players
Yet just who are those consumers? Typically, says Gitelman, they’re “hard-core gamers”— those individuals who buy games at least once a month and who want to move from a game’s start to finish in about 10 hours. Not surprisingly, many of the consumers are college students who sometimes have LAN parties (spontaneous gatherings of people and computers, networked for the purpose of multiplayer computer games) in their dorms.
Mike Allington knows a good deal about LAN parties. He’s the assistant director of student and classroom technology support at Creighton University (NE), a Jesuit institution of about 6,700 students. For the past few years, Creighton has hosted GameFest, a 12-hour marathon of high-tech, interactive gaming sessions among Creighton students, using the school’s hardware and infrastructure. Allington says that he had the epiphany about GameFest while he was in the shower, and his thought process went something like this: a) IT needs students to work for us; b) Gaming appeals to students even more than drinking does; c) Maybe we could bring students together for gaming and, in the process, recruit them as IT support staff!
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