Students Compete at Video Game Creation

zalas writes "Stanford's computer graphics class holds a video game writing competition each year at the end of the term, and this year's results are finally online. You can download all the finalist entries from the website. The winning entries featured very original game concepts, such as sending a spiked soccer ball through wormhole planets or infesting a growing maze of cheese with mold. Judges at the competition included representatives from Electronic Arts, Microsoft and the creator of Pong, Allan Alcorn. Ironically enough, the winners of the wacky category who received a voucher for an XBOX360 wrote a game that only worked on OSX laptops with the drop-protection motion sensors."

Freud on video games

[Douglas Simmons]

Will anything ever dethrone GTA*? According to Sigmund, man's most base needs include seeking food and shelter (running through health packs), seeking pleasure (patronizing prostitutes) and killing (killing prostitutes and cops and everybody else). GTA could not be more Freudianly ticklish, if you will, without crossing the line of objectionability too far to market the game. Therefore, we will thirst for this game the most -- most of us at least.

But these kids are getting cute and innovative. My question is, can they make a brilliant enough game that is PG that would sell more than GTA? Is that even theoretically possible, in light of Freudian theory? The only innovation I can think of to top GTA is things involving mothers but as I noted before that would so cross the line, so that gets ruled out.

Similar to the video game course offered at UCSD

[Rockenreno]

Except you get a good grade instead of a prize for creating a good game. There's nothing like 6 guys spending 10 weeks to develop a 3d multiplayer game. Tons of fun. Tons of sleepless hours in the lab. http://pisa.ucsd.edu/cse190/ [ucsd.edu]

Don't install network aware games...

[xchino]

When I was in my sophomore year high school we had a similar game coding contest at the end of the year, mandatory for all CS students, and voluntary for any student who wanted to enter. There were a lot of cool little games out of it, but mine took first. Not that it was amazing, it was a missile commander clone with the twist of being multiplayer, where up to 4 people could play, 2 defending, and 2 setting the attack points and trajectories. Being the mischeveous little bastard I was back then, I hid a backdoor through an intentional buffer overflow, which was a relatively obscure tactic at the time (1995ish). For my junior and senior years in high school I had a blast messing with other students when they were playing my game, which was now installed by default on all computers in the lab for those that came to play games at lunch. After graduation, I passed on the secret to one of my underclassman friends, and he did the same, for a few years it was an underground legacy until finally someone caught on. I got a call from my old CS teacher, he wanted me to know he thought it was funny, and my game is still installed on all the computers, though patched, and used as his model for teaching the new students what a vulnerability is, and how to find and fix them.

No improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the games from THREE years ago:

http://graphics.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/courses /cs248-videogame-competition/cs248-02/ [nyud.net]

I'd say i'm fairly unimpressed by the lack of improvement of the games over the years. 2002 was a leap in the quality of games over previous years and the subsequent years have just been disappointing. The winner of 02, The Return of Oscuro, pushed cel-shading, polygon-level collision detection, full real-time shadowing, and a host of other techniques that few commercial games had at that time. It even had it's own muscial score custom written for it and a nice silly story line. Pretty good for about 3 weeks of work I'd say.

Re:Similar to the video game course offered at UCS

[Anonymous Coward]

And similar to the course at the ETH. (To get used to the Eiffel libraries)

More games here:
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/download/games/04/ [inf.ethz.ch]
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/download/games/05/ [inf.ethz.ch]

Re:Experimental Gameplay Project

[rsmith-mac]

Frankly it sounds like they've reinvented the WarioWare process, as that's exactly the kind of thing I'd assume Nintendo did for a game all about numerous short mini-games.

Game Programming courses

[jkuff]

A few years ago, I started teaching a game programming course at Carnegie Mellon. We also had a final project competition with Xbox and PS2 prizes, as voted by the students in the class:

[cmu.edu]http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/spring2004/ [cmu.edu]

It is initially tough to convice some of the older, conservative faculty that learning how to write games is something that CMU should be teaching its students. But on second-look, one realizes that what students really learn is fundamental to all of computer science: efficient data structures, effective resource management and memory usage, good user interfaces, handling images and multimedia content, process threading and multi-user networking, etc. However, with a game programming class, you get to teach all of this stuff in a fun way, where students are extremely self-motivated to learn it all.

The class has been quite popular, and many of my students have gone off to work in the game development industry. The best feedback I have received has been from students who enjoyed the fact that their final game projects have been the the only pieces of software they have written during their university days that had a lifetime beyond the course itself. I think game programming is an excellent way to teach coding skills and working as part of a development team, which is a very practical part of any CS curriculum.

There are downloadable movies of some of the recent lab projects here (all written in portable OpenGL code:

http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/spring2004/labs/lab1/ [cmu.edu]
http://gamedev.cs.cmu.edu/spring2004/labs/lab2/ [cmu.edu]

Re:Waste of time

[prozac79]

I could never motivate myself to make a product which wastes time for everyone. Real innovation comes from making productive programs which not only save time, but make money.

Yeah, because the video game and movie industries aren't that profitable. They only generate what? $5 billion or something like that every year in revenues? Programmers that work in that industry make what? $60,000/year salary on average?

There are plenty of decent subjects which you can actually achieve and produce valuable code. Games are just throw away work afterall. Engineering areas need good programs for simulation, nuclear stations could use better monitoring programs, even improvements to existing code which does REAL WORK is great too!

Keep in mind that some of the most demanding programming is game development. It requires knowledge of math, physics, and knowing every hardware and software hack on the books. Everything that they learn designing these games can be applicable to other areas as well. Most of the students in the class are graduate students doing real research and not punk "kids". By the time a lot of people take this class you've already weeded out most of those "I want to get a CS degree so I can write games!" crowd anyway.

This game competition is not part of a games class, but part of a graphics class that is very graphics-theory intensive which has a wide range of applications besides games. It's just that writing games is a great way of learning and applying those theories.