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February 22, 2007
Stephane Natkin, ENJMIN, games and education
Games and Education is the theme of the next session of the NYU Gaming Seminar. Our special guest speaker is Stephane Natkin
Abstract:
The Graduate School of Games and Interactive Media:
A new pedagogy of training for games
In 1998, I started to work on the project of a public school of games. By that time some professionals were no convinced of the necessity of such school. Numerous universities provided some modules devoted to games in a given subject: programming, graphics and animation, writing and narration; but, to my knowledge, there was, in the world, no specific formation covering the whole design and development process of games, except a school in Japan sponsored by the publisher Komani. All the games produced so far, the great and the bad ones, were designed by peoples coming from various fields, from electrical engineering to cinema and audiovisuals or clever designer without any academic background. Many game designers thought that there was no reason for a change and that an academic training may lead to more conventional games. In counterpart some publishers and managers of game studio agreed on the fact that the game design production world was changing and that a structured and fundamental adapted formation could lead to a new generation of games and new application of game design principles. With the help of French professional game associations (SELL, APOM), the French Government and the Poitou-Charentes region the training opened in 2001 and the Graduate School of Games and Interactive Media (ENJMIN) was officially announced by the prime minister in 2003. In 2007, the ENJMIN will open the same degree in Singapore, in 2008 in St Petersburg (Russia).
The graduate school of games pedagogy is based on the two assumptions: a profession in the game industry is a specialization of a given basic knowledge, the production process of games relies is closely related to the film production process, a cooperative work in multidisciplinary teams. So the school offer mainly an European Master Degree opened to students with at least a bachelor degree and in one of the following fields: Audiovisual, Visual Arts, Sound and Music Design, Computer Science, Psycho-perception and Cognition. Students are selected for their background, their creativity and their passion for video games. The structure of the education is highly inspired from cinema high school (FEMIS, INSAS, NYFA, Lodz Film School …). The two main goals of the pedagogy are:
• To train people to a multidisciplinary work in te
Posted by jean-marc at February 22, 2007 04:16 PM