Game Development and Emerging Media

The Game Development and Emerging Media program prepares you to enter the video game development field—a billion-dollar industry rich with robust career opportunities in edutainment, simulation, and visualization. 

Through this innovative, practice-based curriculum, you master the creative workflows and advanced technologies that enable you to craft compelling playable media. By pushing the boundaries of storytelling genres, weaving unique interactive experiences, and engaging audiences through play, students who embark on this production track become inventive media-makers and storytellers. 

In keeping with the University’s Vincentian mission, you explore the ethical considerations of gameplay development. When can simulated experiences promote healthy attitudes and empathy? How can the bourgeoning game developer cultivate a socially responsible creative practice to promote social change, one person at a time? 

The Game Development and Emerging Media program is uniquely interdisciplinary; you will graduate with unmatched experience and a highly marketable résumé and portfolio. Rooted in collaborative practice, the major enables the development of immersive and novel interactive experiences across disciplinary lines, in partnership with faculty and students across the University campus.  

For example, students in Game Development team with students majoring in pharmacology to create a serious game to model patient interventions. Students in Game Development collaborate with those majoring in hospitality to author simulations that explore cognitive empathy in accessible tourism. In other instances, students develop immersive simulations for a criminal justice course in police tactical decision-making; interactive data visualizations in a public relations course in crisis communications; virtual environments that allow premedical students to practice clinical skills; or author interactive forms of expanded cinema and volumetric filmmaking. 

Instrumental to the success of the young developer’s pursuit to author engrossing games and content for novel platforms is the University’s array of newly minted, state-of-the-art facilities. The Media Art and Design Lab, the Technology Commons, the Advanced Graphics Lab, and the Innovation Lab house the latest technologies, providing the incubation space to spark creative and entrepreneurial thinking. Custom-built workstations enable you to rehearse key roles—the 3D modeler, the animator, the programmer, the sound artist, the experience designer, and more—so that you are primed to succeed from day one.

While many choose to pursue these well-established roles, our nimble, adaptive graduates are poised to pursue the emerging professional roles that fuse the game, television, and film industries. Exciting new ventures in visualization, performance capture, and hybrid virtual production show remarkable promise in combining game engine technology and cinematic production, as game development’s multibillion dollar growth trend wildly outpaces the television and film industries.