http://gaim.umbc.edu/news Games, Animation and Interactive Media: news on academic programs, courses, activities, developments and career options Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:56:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For those of you looking to get into the games industry, here's something to convince those skeptical friends and family members. A recent Arstechnica article reports that the games industry, which has been growing like crazy, is predicted to keep on growing. The games industry took in almost $42 billion ... http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/06/21/games-will-keep-growing/ Electronic Arts, which will launch Will Wright's Spore in September, has released Creature Creator -- a module that let's players create Spore creatures. Technology review interviewd Lucy Bradshaw, Spore's executive producer, about the use of procedural generation in Creature Creator (Creating Creatures). The Creature Creator, the first piece of Electronic Arts' ... http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/06/19/ea-releases-spore-creature-creator/ Onion News Network has a funny piece on virtual worlds, taken to their logical limit: 'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'. "My avatar is the biggest World of World of Warcraft fan in the whole World of World of Warcraft world. ... The graphics are amazing, uhh, they're ... http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/06/15/world-of-world-of-warcraft/ I gave three half-hour hands on presentations at the Frederick County, Maryland Future Link conference for high-school sophomores Thursday. It was pretty fun, and the students (about 25-30 in each group) were great! Preparing for this, I remembered that back when I was in junior-high and high school, I'd learned ... http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/06/01/frederick-county-future-link-and-memories-of-the-past/ The May 29th meeting of the Baltimore chapter of the International Game Developers Association will be a showcase and demo of student projects around the area. See the announcement for details on where and when. http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/05/13/may-baltimore-igda-meeting-student-showcase/ Many online games have a strong social component to them -- from Second Life to World of Warcraft -- and the trend toward making games social is increasing. If you are interested in social media and social computing systems, you might consider going to a free self-organizing conference on ... http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/05/06/free-self-organizing-conference-on-social-computing-this-sat-in-baltimore/ ZeniMax (parent company of Bethesda Softworks) is opening a new studio in Hunt Valley, MD, ZeniMax online. New studio means lots of new hires, as their job listing page shows. http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/05/02/zenimax-opening-new-md-studio/ Link. http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/04/21/nice-article-on-the-anatomy-of-a-video-game-class-in-the-sun/ First, the announcment: UMBC's Game Developer's Club along with the Computer Science Department, is hosting their annual Digital Entertainment Conference on April 12 from 10:30am - 6:00pm in Lecture Hall 3 in the Administration Building. This all day event includes speakers from local video game companies like Breakaway, Big Huge ... http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/04/02/umbc-3rd-annual-digital-entertainment-conference/ The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has created a new scholarship program for women and minority students pursuing full-time undergraduate degrees related to game development (that's both of the degrees in our GAIM program). They're giving away 15 $3000 awards for next year. The deadline is May 15th. More information: www.scholarshipamerica.org/ESAF http://gaim.umbc.edu/news/2008/03/27/scholarship-for-women-and-minority-students/