Game and Media Centers are increasingly being started at universities around the world. Back in 2002-2003, I worked with my colleagues and successfully established the Applied Media & Simulation Games Center (AMSGC). The AMSGC is housed in the Communications Media Department, in the College of Education and Educational Technology at Indiana University of Pennsylania (IUP) in Indiana, Pennsylvania.
The following seven sections provide an overview of the ideas and initiatives that went into the creation of the AMSGC:
Why Create a Media and Game Center?
Student Involvement / Student Experiences
Hands-on / Project-based Learning
Interdisciplinary Involvement
Mission/Focus
Research / Funding / Organization
Process / Collaboration
Why Create a Media and Game Center?
The original inspiration for the AMSGC stemmed from my involvement with Dr. Sandy Stone’s ACTlab (the Advanced Communications Technology Lab) at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. Stone has created a place that continues to serve as a beacon for motivated students to gather, learn and do amazingly creative work together.
The defining drive behind the proposal and work for the AMSGC was to create a center for the students in various departments, colleges and IUP as a whole. We wanted to create a space and place for students to do hands-on, project-based media and game work. At the same time, we believed that a center would serve as a locus and focus for this type of work on the campus. It would enable IUP to better illustrate its technology and media capabilities to recruit students and win grant and research work. So, the AMSGC is there for students and faculty to apply what they learn and teach through media and game projects.
Creating a center helped lay the foundation for growing, both in prestige and acknowledgement, but also in advancing on IUP’s capabilities to create, and teach, cutting-edge applications and techniques. Without a center, this type of advancement could occur, but with its mere existence as an entity, it can enable more opportunities to facilitate growth at IUP than would have been possible without this focus.
The name for the center is meant to honor the history of media work that has been done in the Communications Media department and highlight games as a new direction of focus. With AMSGC officially recognized, it can be a base to continually draw interested students and offer them engaging learning experiences in which they work together and apply their ideas to create media and game projects.
Student Involvement / Student Experiences
As I’ve mentioned, the AMSGC was created primarily to serve the students at IUP, but it also needs students to become involved. Without students there wouldn’t be a center because there wouldn’t be any energy or people in which to populate the projects and help complete the work.
A large part of the effort was to run a university-wide PR campaign to garner and increase student involvement. This campaign was organized with the help of students, working to understand the general interests of the student body and how to craft the center to meet those interests. While communicating with students, we discovered several interesting and prevalent misconceptions about that center that we quickly worked to correct.
First of all, many students assumed that they had to have a major in the same department that housed the center. So, we announced that the center needed and welcomed students from other disciplines across the university to get involved.
Second, students thought they had to be a production media specialist and/or a computer programmer. While we needed students with these artistic and technical skills, we worked to communicate how we also needed students who are interested in communications, operations and management.
Third, students assumed if they missed the first few general meetings, then it was too late to get involved until the following semester. So, we made more public announcements letting them know that they were welcome to get involved at any time.
Fourth, students believed that it was solely a game center. While the AMSGC has a strong emphasis on creating and studying games, it is an applied media center first and foremost. So, we worked hard to also emphasize all the types of media work that could be done through the center (films, television, musical cds, games, simulations, etc.)
Finally, graduate students thought it was for undergraduates only. We quickly worked to let graduate students know that their involvement was greatly encouraged. Both graduate and undergraduate students could learn from each other working together on projects.
This PR campaign helped us get close to 75 students from all around IUP involved initially. We then planned to build on this involvement so that more and more students would understand how they could participate if they’re interested.
While the center definitely needed the students, it offers them invaluable experiences in return. They have the opportunity to meet other students and faculty and create engaging media and game projects and get real-world-applicable work experience.
Hands-on / Project-based Learning
The primary reason for the center is to allow students to apply what they learn in courses through hands-on, project-based learning. This gives students invaluable learning and working experiences. They learn the ins and outs of how to collaborate on a team. They also learn project management skills as they work with timelines, deliverables and the process of designing and developing media and games.
We worked to highlight existing courses at IUP that offered students the information they needed to better apply themselves on projects. We also worked to illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of projects by highlighting courses offered in various departments around campus (Computer Science, Business, Art, Journalism, Communications, English, etc.).
Concurrently, we worked to develop new courses that would enhance what the university already offered and give students more courses from which to choose and build their skills and knowledge.
The goal was to have AMSGC enable students to construct their own learning experiences by working directly on projects together and creating engaging media and game experiences. This hands-on, project-based work would also give them portfolio-worthy material as they moved forward to begin establishing their careers.
Interdisciplinary Involvement
The AMSGC developed out of the interdisciplinary support of students, faculty, and administrators from departments and colleges around the university. We worked hard to garner this university-wide support and input.
This was a strategy with several objectives. One, we believed that applied media and simulation game projects require a wide diversity of skill sets and knowledge bases. Also, the projects running in the center would need, and benefit from, interdisciplinary expertise and involvement. Two, it greatly facilitated and expedited the political and bureaucratic processes that had to be traversed in order to establish the center. There was always the potential of opposition to the idea of a center, and having a wide base of support helped work through it. We had some initial opposition at IUP, but our interdisciplinary approach gave the proposal credibility and helped to assuage concerns. The more university-wide support we were able to show, the better our proposal was received and considered.
Specifically, we noticed that the following college areas had vested interests as to the perceived area of study of a media and game center; computer science, business, math, art, and communications. We worked to include all of these areas and created a collaborative effort with our proposal.
In the end, interdisciplinary involvement helped ensure that we could create truly engaging media and game experiences across a vast range of genres and subjects areas. It exposes students to faculty outside of their majors and fosters a culture in which working together is encouraged, and the benefits are seen in the creation of a projects that sum up the strengths of all involved.
Mission/Focus
It was a great help to have a strong mission statement and center focus developed early in the process. Having both of these facilitated the approval of the center by giving concepts for people to discuss and to which they could give their support. It served as a solid first reference to give to faculty and administrators and helped introduce them to the idea of the center.
The initial mission statement was composed in two parts; one focusing on the bigger picture and the other on the benefits for the students involved. Our mission statement is:
AMSGC is dedicated to exploring current and emerging multi|media technologies |
including all communications media | audio | video | graphics | etc. | to enhance communication experiences and environments | the interdisciplinary juxtaposition of entertainment and education, teaching and technology | critical thinking | conceptual foundations | concrete skills
AMSGC students will get | a conceptual understanding of communications media | theory and practice | a practical knowledge of the development of multi|media | humanities and technologies | an interdisciplinary grounding in their field | experience and expertise | a grasp of how to apply what they have learned
Our center focus is a series of connected concepts which is also composed in two parts:
playing | learning | working | communication and media | applied theory | open source | enabling people to use technology | exploring concepts and developing skills | empowering people for change
AMSGC succeeds through collaboration | through groups of people working together to achieve more than one could alone | learning how to communicate | collaboration internally and externally | with each other | with other groups | with the world |
This expressive mission statement and center focus served as a spark for the ideas, shaping how we developed the goals and objectives for the center.
Research / Funding / Organization
To advance the initial focus of having the AMSGC provide a new learning outlet for students, we organized research initiatives to encourage faculty involvement and start a process of securing regular funding and projects in which students would have the opportunity and responsibility of working with clients. This afforded research opportunities for faculty, and good PR for the university, as well as providing learning experiences for the students.
We also develoed processes to work with internal and external projects, and organized how students would get trained and promoted from working on volunteer-based projects to client-based projects.
For our volunteer-based projects, we set up an ongoing project that is essentially a student-operated and student-run multimedia station. This station would serve a dual purpose of enabling students to get together and work on projects as well as being a training ground. Students would have the full support a faculty advisors and technical equipment as they work with timelines and deliverables. They would also learn the process of project management and how media and games are designed and developed. Newer students would be working under more experienced students who would mentor and provide support. Students who stay involved and are interested can take on more responsibilities at the station and begin leading station projects.
Client-based projects are funded through grants or contracts. For these projects, faculty would be able to work with students from the station who already have experience and are prepared to accept the opportunities and responsibilities of working with clients. These funded projects would offer students work experiences with financial compensation and direct interactions with industry professionals and other clients.
So, the AMSGC would help coordinate faculty research efforts, which in turn would give students great learning experiences working on projects through the center.
Process / Collaboration
As seen in the AMSGC focus, collaboration was a keystone to the center. Throughout the entire process what enabled the initial approval, and allowed for opportunities in the future, was the openness to collaboration.
It was crucial in developing the growing community around the university, and on local, national and international levels. By simply looking to include anyone who was interested and working to create a system that helped organize and maximize everyone’s contributions we wee trying to foster an environment in which students learned how to share their expertise and experiences as they worked together applying what they’ve learned.
To help shape our efforts we created two advisory boards. The internal board was comprised of students, faculty and administrators from around the university. The external board was made up of leaders from areas of education, academics, game development and media. These boards helped expand the community while also helping to guide growth.
We strengthened the community further by reaching out to create affiliations and connections with other centers, labs, universities, companies, organizations and associations. One of the goals was to create a synergy of connections and a workforce that would attract more industry development in the region. The network formed through these connections would enable each node in the network to benefit from the articulations and in turn the entire network would benefit from the successes of all the nodes.
Personally, I have since moved on from IUP, but the AMSGC is still thriving and growing. Looking back, I believe that starting a university center is a great way to help focus on an area of study such as new media and games.
Notes
(1) ACTlab http://www.actlab.utexas.edu
(2) Applied Media & Simulation Games Center http://www.iup.edu/amsgc