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Game Time!
NC State is fueling big-time growth in North Carolina’s games industry.
John O’Neill builds video games for a living. And not just the games with heroes and villains (though he creates plenty of them), but also ones that promote brands, train employees and educate students.
O’Neill, the founder and president of Cary’s three-year-old Spark Plug Games, is in many ways emblematic of the Triangle’s burgeoning games industry. The area is home to dozens of gaming companies and one of the industry’s premier conferences, and it’s at the forefront of the “serious” game development that’s become so important to the success of businesses and schools.
But O’Neill sees another key player in the region’s games industry. It’s his alma mater, NC State, which is driving industry growth by making important research advances, graduating talented, well-rounded students and creating programs that foster innovation in the field.
“I love how much NC State is doing right now to spur company growth and support new ideas,” said O’Neill, a 1996 computer science graduate.
With help from NC State and its engineering and computer science alumni, the Triangle games industry has exploded over the past decade. Droves of companies have relocated, expanded or started up in the area, and today about 40 games companies employing as many as 1,500 people have operations in the region. They include the headquarters of industry giant Epic Games and many smaller firms like Spark Plug that are playing increasingly prominent roles in the growing game-development field.
The growth has come amidst unprecedented change in an industry that was once associated with teenagers punching away at Nintendo and Sega consoles in their parents’ basements. Today, the average gamer in the US is close to 35 years old, a potent purchasing demographic, and the industry has expanded into serious games that range from military simulations to surgical training to children’s educational software.
The Triangle, and NC State in particular, have been quick to capitalize on gaming’s growing popularity, and Dr. Michael Young, associate professor of computer science and co-director of the proposed Digital Games Research Center (DGRC) at NC State, has been at the forefront of those efforts.
Young and others at NC State have worked with the business community to build a Raleigh game developers’ conference into the premier event of its kind on the East Coast. Until this year, the event had been called the Triangle Game Conference, but it has grown so large that the third installment, in April, is called the East Coast Game Conference.
Young also sits on the board of the Triangle Game Initiative, which runs the conference and supported the establishment of new state incentives for gaming companies. The incentives, which began this year, provide companies with a 15 percent tax credit on compensation and wages for employees involved in digital media development and production.
The growth in gaming, and serious gaming in particular, has come about because video games are essentially learning machines, Young said. To succeed in Halo, Donkey Kong or any other game, players must learn rules, solve problems, reach goals, and understand how their actions affect the gaming environment. That’s why schools, businesses and government agencies are increasingly incorporating games into their lessons and training programs.
“We engage with educational games the same way,” Young said, “and so they have the same compelling learning potential as when you’re playing a traditional game and learning how Mario jumps.”
These serious games need skilled developers, and NC State faculty and students are filling those roles. Through a new game development concentration in computer science, which was recently ranked among the top 15 undergraduate video game design and development programs in the US and Canada by the Princeton Review, students can tailor their academic careers around gaming courses. As seniors, they can participate in a game design showcase that puts computer science and design students on a team. The task: Build the best game possible.
Collaborations like these mean students from different disciplines get experience with the entire game development process, said Tim Buie, co-director of the DGRC and an assistant professor of design at NC State. That’s attractive to employers.
“Both sides get to see what kind of world the other lives in, and when they do that it stops becoming this unknown, arcane thing. That’s the magic that occurs here,” Buie said. “The students understand that they are part of a bigger process where the team depends on you and you depend on your teammates.”
Last year’s showcase featured Terraform, a game that teaches chemistry by placing players in a world where they need to solve chemical puzzles to create habitable conditions for humans. The game was a student-division finalist at a large gaming conference in Florida last fall.