Ok, I have been meaning to write this for a while, but school is busy.

As some of you know, though most do not, I have decided to go back to school. Specifically, graduate school in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie-Mellon. Basically I have gone back to school to learn how to make video games. The ETC actually covers several more areas than just games, but that’s the idea in ten words or less. So what is it like studying Entertainment Technology?

Overall the first couple of months of school have been pretty cool. It has been a lot of work. The first semester of the program includes the most intensive courses, as do most programs. My semester is divided among:
• Visual Story – basically a film studies class
• Improvisational Acting (I am not kidding) – a class in interactive story telling
• Seminars
• Building Virtual Worlds (or BVW for short) – our biggest class

Basically, I would say 70-80% of my time is working on BVW projects that we do in groups of about 4-5 people. Every couple of weeks we are assigned to a new group of people and have to develop an interactive experience for some piece of technology (usually a Virtual Reality Headset). The goal of class isn’t so much teaching us how to create new stuff as it is teaching us how to work in a group. Do I like it? For the most part I do, and most of my complaints are just small stuff. But I will say that despite how cool Virtual Reality seems, it really does suck. In 50 years it might be something worthwhile, but today and in the near future, I doubt it will live up to people’s expectations.

Overall, the program is very career/industry centric. Hence the design of the BVW class is to demonstrate what it will be like working in the entertainment industry. I am not required to write a thesis for my masters degree, and after this semester I will be working on projects until the completion of my degree. Some will be student projects, others will be projects brought in by outside clients.

Because the ETC is part of Carnegie-Mellon, needless to say, it has some connections to groups in the real world. Just last week we had Activision come looking for interns and the week before, Microsoft showed up with a demo of the X-Box 360.

Anyway, I guess this ended up being an introduction piece. Jeff thought it would be cool for me to talk about be adventures at school. So I am going to try and do it when I can. In the meantime, I think I am going to head home. I am hoping I will be able to write something a little more intelligent after Monday night, when our current project is due. This time around, my group decided to work on a getaway driving game using the VR headset. I will say this: if I have learned anything here, it is that VR is not as cool as one would think it is.