Interactive Games and Media

It was only a year ago when Odopod was praising the New Media talent pouring out of RIT, but after our recent Creativity: Careers in Motion event (aka "industry day") they are at it again. In a recent blog post entitled For New Media Education, It Doesn't Get Much Better Than RIT, Tim Barber once again praises our programs and the students we're producing at RIT. Many thanks to Odopod for their involvement and engagement with our students, and to our collaborative partners in the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences that help to make New Media the success that it is. Kudos to all involved!

IGM is pleased to announce that Blocku finished in the top 10 of the Collegiate and Developer Prize Stream of the National STEM Video Game Challenge! This competition is targeted specifically for student and professional game developers to create educational games for K-4 students. The competition drew over 550 submissions, including entries by teams from Harvard, the Sea Research Foundation, and many others. Second year Game Design & Development student Matt Critelli was the author of the XNA version of the game that won the award. While sadly the game was not one of the 3 finalists selected by the White House, top 10 out of over 500 submissions is still impressive!

Please join our distinguished alumni award recipient, Katie Linendoll, for her presentation as a part of the Dean's Lecture Series on Friday, April 8 from 1-2:30pm. Registration information will be available here.

Topic: Robotic lifeguards, skin guns for second degree burns, and what it's like to challenge IBM's Watson in a full game of Jeopardy! Get an insider's preview of some of the future-forward technologies you can expect to see in the coming years. Also, Katie will have some interesting tips on how to turn your passion into your career. A question and answer session will follow.

Bio: Katie Linendoll is an Emmy award-winning TV personality and technology expert, appearing on CNN and the CBS Early Show and regularly contributing her expertise to magazines like People, People Style Watch, Marie Claire, Shape and Fitness.

IGM is proud to announce that GCCIS PH.D. student Emma Zhiyu Liao has received a summer research fellowship at Xerox Research Center in Webster, NY. She will be working in the Collaborative and Interactive Workflows Area, researching concepts involving the application of gamification techniques to knowledge and research collaboration in enterprise environments.

Emma is a first year Computing and Information Science Ph.D. student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research interests are how gamification mechanics could impact knowledge collaboration and potentially change the fields of education and the business. She holds a BS in MIS and received her MBA in Technology Management and Entrepreneurship at RIT. She is currently engaged in coursework in both the Ph.D. program and the MS in Game Design & Development, as well as IGM research projects sponsored by Microsoft Research, in addition to her ongoing work with Xerox. Her advisor is Professor Elizabeth Lawley of Interactive Games & Media.

We are proud to celebrate the tenth anniversiary of the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. Named for its founding donor, B. Thomas Golisano, the college has become, over this past decade, one of the largest and most successful of its type in higher education today. Please join us on April 21, 2011, from 5:00-6:30 PM in the atrium of Golisano Hall to celebrate this milestone, and RSVP at http://www.rit.edu/alumni/gccis10/.

Rochester Institute of Technology’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences has unveiled its latest school. The School of Interactive Games and Media has been established to foster continued growth of some of the university’s most popular programs: its undergraduate and graduate programs in game design and development and its undergraduate degree in new media interactive development.

“The Golisano College has become internationally known in the fields of new media, game design and development, interaction design and social computing,” says Jorge Diaz-Herrera, dean of the college. “Creating this school will allow us to continue to lead the country in providing a top-rated educational experience for our students, timely and relevant research contributions to the field and an engaging and creative environment for our campus community.”

It's that crazy time of year again, when we all rush off in between academic quarters to show the world what we're up to at the Game Developer's Conference. This year we will once again have a booth on the floor, several faculty, staff, and students in attendance, and a number of interesting games and media projects to show. We are also hosting an alumni dinner on Thursday March 3rd, and if you are an alum in the area please consider joining us for a lovely meal! We're also excited to get to see our advisory board members both during the conference and at our bi-annual meeting. We're excited to bring the College of Compuing and Information Sciences and RIT at one of our favorite industry events... see you there!

Rochester Institute of Technology offers an elite game design and development program, according to new national rankings from The Princeton Review. The Princeton Review, one of the nation’s best known education services companies, teamed with GamePro Media to produce the second annual “Top Schools for Video Game Design Study for 2011.” RIT’s program, which is housed in the Department of Interactive Games and Media within the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, ranks fourth at the graduate level and ninth at the undergraduate level.

IGM and Microsoft are proud to host a local "game jam" event Feb 11-13 for students to prepare games for submission to Microsoft's ImagineCup competitions. The RIT/IGM event will focus on ImagineCup's game design challenges. Microsoft has written up a great recap of the event here and posted some photos. Our sincere thanks to Microsoft for everything, we had a wonderful time. In addition, student teams from Cornell University and Ithaca College made the trip to take part in the event! Our friends from Second Avenue Software also came by.

This past week, RIT was a local participant and sponsor in a world-wide event entitled the ‘Global Game Jam’, sponsored in part by the Interactional Game Developer’s Association. Locally we held a 'node' of the event in the Game Design & Development laboratory on the second floor of the Golisano College of Computing & Information Sciences, and staffed the event with IGM faculty and students to support the activity. This year, as part of the Gamesauce challenge, a Top-10 list was selected out of the entries submitted from around the world. One of the teams from RIT is being recognized on this list! The 'Ultimate Celebration' (the game produced at RIT that was awarded this honor) team consists of Brian Soulliard (BSc Software Engineering), Lawrence Jung (BSc Game Design & Development), Lane Lawley (BSc Computer Science) and Devin Ford (BSc Game Design & Development).

The ten winning games were selected from the 1487 games that were developed last weekend during the Global Game Jam 2011. Each winning team has been awarded the opportunity to showcase their game during Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg, Germany. Submissions were judged based on the potential of their teams to create commercially viable projects. Congrats to the Ultimate Celebration team!