Five leading professors discuss the growth of games education and what needs to happen to better the industry

The video game industry is well over 30 years old, but it hasn’t been until the last decade or so that we’ve truly seen colleges and universities taking game design curricula seriously. As the education sector comes to grips with the fact that gaming is a massive global business, more and more games education programs have been popping up at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Education can have a big impact on shaping the minds of the game designers of tomorrow, and the industry can only benefit from the continued evolution and improvement we’ve been seeing in academia.

To find out more about the state of games education, where it’s headed and what is still lacking, GamesIndustry International assembled a panel of five top professors in the field. Answering our questions in the panel below are:

Drew Davidson (Director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University)
Tracy Fullerton (Chair of USC’s Interactive Media & Games Division and Director of USC Game Innovation Lab)
Magy Seif El-Nasr (Associate Professor and Director of Game Educational Programs and Research at Northeastern)
Katherine Isbister (Research Director, Game Innovation Lab at Polytechnic Institute of NYU and Associate Professor, NYU School of Engineering Computer Science and Engineering Department and Tisch Game Center)
John Romero (Creative Director at UC Santa Cruz’s master’s in games and playable media)