Sources: https://games.wp.rpi.edu/curriculum/
Some interesting things I found while researching the GSAS program at RPI (was unable to get in contact with anyone there despite emails, also reached out to the people at Bard and Baker in hopes of getting a look at the commercial world of gaming - my SDA this month, if I can't finagle an interview by Wednesday, is about how to manage creativity with selling power when it comes to games. How much should you appeal to your audience and how niche can you get while still staying in the black? Also in the middle of a conversation with a friend who plays baseball team management simulator games where I'm trying to figure out how in the heck that is interesting and worth shelling out the dough for.):
- Required courses include intros in both game programming and storytelling, which makes GSAS an interesting field: you're working through problems concerning both technology and creativity.
- In your second year in the GSAS program, you have to take physics, which means I'm never going into that field ever, but it also leads to the idea of immersion that I visited earlier in the year. The programming has to lead to characters, stylized or not, whose worlds have some sort of physics code. That's the whole thing about cognitive behavioral game design: these things are important for shaping your environment and getting players invested.
- GSAS 1600 is all about the history of gaming, but it goes back all the way to the ancient Sumerians. What that tells me is that GSAS is also focused on psychology - why we play games the way we do, what sort of emotional investment we put in them, etc. - and how to exploit it, so to speak.
- There are different concentrations within the GSAS program, some of which (my favorites) are focused in the COMM (communications) department. In COMM 4250 (Writing for Games II) a lot of focus is put into the concept of IP, or intellectual property, development. According to Wikipedia, intellectual property is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, but more importantly, IP is the stuff of copyrights. What shocked me is that within the GSAS curriculum I did not see a focus or requirement on any business courses, which leads me to wonder why? It's something I plan to look into this weekend.