On Course
Title: CSC 329 Introduction to Game Planning
Academic Area: Computer Science, College of Arts and sciences
Semester: Spring 2007

In the three decades since Atari’s Pong bounced its way into American homes, video gaming has become a $12 billion-plus industry. Designing a game that appeals to today’s sensory- hungry, interactively driven players requires a complex set of skills—“gaming concepts, software engineering, computer graphics, digital music and video, multimedia platforms, artificial intelligence, and physics fundamentals,” explains Uttam Sarkar, professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, who is a visiting professor in the UM Department of Computer Science until spring 2008.

Sarkar, who chose computer science as a career “because it was the most exciting academic discipline in the early 1980s,” requires students to produce a working video game. He doesn’t expect anything along the lines of Halo or Grand Theft Auto, which are as complex as a Hollywood production, but he was impressed by his students’ classroom creations. “Some groups nicely conceived imaginary worlds where they placed their hero and adversaries and created encounters that made the game very interesting,” Sarkar says.

The course is part of the Gaming Track, which attracts one-fourth of students in the Department of Computer Science. Sarkar believes the video game industry will continue to sizzle, particularly with advances in wireless technology, network gaming, and educational applications. “The primary goal of this course is to make students familiar with the basics so they can comfortably enter the gaming industry as a career if they wish,” Sarkar says. “The market doesn’t have enough supply of such skilled manpower, and that’s a big opportunity for those who would like to pursue it.”