Interactive Games and Media Department

Recently a number of alumni have contacted me about the fact that they are now working in the new mobile games space driven by the hardware shift to the graphically capable smartphone. This is directly in line with industry trends, and represents the continually expanding market for students entering the workforce! First up: Mark Conforti, Andy Magnotta, and Michael Hwang, all graduates of the 2D/3D sequence, are out working for Venan Entertainment and just released Space Miner. Next, Kenny Johnson was recently back in town to tell us about his exciting work in starting up Zephyr Games. Jon Parise recently moved over to a position with BrightKite. And one of our graduate students, Josh Wilson, accepted a position with Zynga. Good luck to all our grads and former students out there in the crazy world of mobile game development!

The IGM Department at RIT has partnered with the IGDA Global Game Jam to hold a GGJ session here at RIT. We can't wait to see what cool stuff comes out of this development day! Many thanks for the IGDA and Intel for partnering with us on these initiatives... read more about this exciting event here.

Erik Vick, a professor in the Department of Interactive Games and Media, published a new book titled Emotion Notions: Modeling Personality in Game Character AI, through Cengage's Course Technology PTR imprint on August 24, 2009. The book is a continuation of Dr. Vick's research focus and explores the theory and concepts behind video game AI while showing you how to increase believability, interaction, engagement and immersion by modeling human personality, mood, and emotion video game characters.

Professors Phelps, Kurtz, and Doubleday will all be presenting work at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles, from case-studies of IGM curriculum to interesting student work from the NMID and GD&D programs. As the sessions go live, there will be various twitter and video streams on the Adobe website, so be sure and check it out! In addition, Professor Phelps will be running an academic discussion pod on Sunday night Oct. 4th in the Figeroa Hotel. There will be lots of eye-candy and examples of student projects, so please stop by!

Many members of the RIT community have already begun playing http://www.picturetheimpossible.com, an ARG developed through a partnership with the RIT Lab for Social Computing and the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle with additional support from the IGM department. . That includes RIT President Bill Destler and his wife Rebecca Johnson, who participated in the scavenger hunt through the Neighborhood of the Arts last weekend. See if you can spot them in the photo gallery from the hunt!

Lots of RIT students submitted Photosynths for the Picture the Horses challenge, too—we had over 100 Photosynths submitted, most of which can be seen here.

We’ve been working most of the summer to put together the web presence for the department, and we’re finally up and rolling. For the design of the site, we’ve had the pleasure of working with Darkwind Media, a local firm that was founded by several former students with degrees in New Media and Game Design & Development.

The programs in the IGM department and our innovative use of Adobe technologies have led to our recent recognition as an Adobe Education Developer Partner. As a part of this award, Adobe will help support our work through generous donations of software, acess to developers and beta programs to select faculty, and the use of our work as a demonstration of best practice (such as the recent case-study published about the new media team project showcase project featuring recent graduates of the NMID program, as well as Nancy Doubleday, Associate Professor of Interactive Games & Media, and Steven Kurtz, Professor of Interactive Games & Media). We also recently published a case example on IGM curriculum as an Adobe case study. In addition, Prof. Phelps, Chair of the IGM Department, was recently invited to serve as an Adobe Education Leader.

Two projects, Sociable and Movosity, from the 2009 New Media Team Projects have reached the semi-finals for the Adobe Design Awards... Many congratulations to the students involved in producing this work, and to the faculty who helped make NM Team Project a success for 2009!

RIT students in the GD&D undergraduate and graduate programs teamed up to make a custom "banjo game" in Professor Schwartz 'Alternative Controllers Seminar'. It was a great deal of fun, and it is now featured on BoingBoing, direct from our booth at GDC 2009! You can find out more about the banjo game, and see some pictures of President Destler playing it in the GD&D Lab in this article from University News.