While film allows a viewer to peek into an imagined world, gaming immerses a player in that world, allowing him or her to experience it firsthand.
And the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television is in on the action.
“Games and interactive media promise to be a popular art form for the 21st century, comparable to film and television in the 20th century,” said Robert Rosen, dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television. “It engages hundreds of thousands of people in the creations of stories that take place in a virtual dimension created by the players.”
With the rise of so-called “massive multiplayer online role-playing games,” consumers no longer passively absorb the images and information around them ““ they are active explorers of the metaverse. The metaverse is a large-scale virtual universe in which players can function via avatars ““ their virtual counterparts ““ in games such as “Second Life.”
To keep with the times, Rosen tapped creative development researcher Jacquelyn Morie to create a special course in digital media regarding game design.
“As moving-image media and forms of popular culture evolve, it’s important that a university be ready to explore its creative possibilities,” Rosen said. “The games take place at the convergence of design, technology and storytelling ““ and storytelling is the business that (our film school) is in.”
Morie will teach Film and Television 188A for the third time this quarter. The course for spring quarter is titled “Narrative Construction in the Metaverse,” which focuses on the storytelling capabilities within “Second Life.”
“I’m trying to give students a view of games beyond what they see in the media,” Morie said. “I’m hoping that they will create interactive experiences ““ which could be a game, but it doesn’t have to be ““ that will be emotionally evocative or maybe even start a new kind of art form.”
During the fall, Morie explored the substance of games, as she brought in guest speakers, one of whom relayed an anecdote about a male student who cried after the death of a character in a game, demonstrating the newly discovered deep emotional impact of gaming.
“Games are getting more advanced and there are people who want more meaning in it,” said first-year computer science and engineering student Abraham Roh, who is currently enrolled in Morie’s class. “Just making it fun and crazy isn’t enough. You need a method and a narrative.”
This quarter’s course challenges students to develop and test their own gaming ideas.
In this case, “Second Life” is an especially convenient creative tool for Morie’s students, as it allows users to build anything within the metaverse while still retaining the copyright for any of their inventions.
“It becomes a creative outlet because it’s just so impressive that (“˜Second Life’) has its own programming language and allows users to do whatever they want,” Roh said. “To be able to script inside the game but still keep ownership is a lot of freedom that helps develop ideas and imagination.”
But teaching within the “Second Life” construct is not without its difficulties, according to Morie, who cites that the resource, as an educational tool, is still in its infancy.
“(In “˜Second Life’) you can’t build something like a normal classroom, (but) you can be working with a dragon or fairy,” Morie said. “But it doesn’t matter because everybody is working together and that may open a new sense of tolerance in many ways, bringing together people from different backgrounds.”
Perhaps the inherent diversity of “Second Life” explains the wide array of students interested in the course: Thirty-one students in her fall class spanned 25 different majors.
“All of us in the class study different things, and it helps us because game development requires a variety of skills,” Roh said.
“It’s not a computer class where you worry about getting the mechanics right or an English class where you only develop your story. It’s about combining all of those different things and making it work; that’s what art is.”
As an emerging creative medium, gaming and interactive media attracts Rosen’s attention because of its potential to become a force in entertainment, expression and education.
“If you’re there in the beginning, you can help to move this new media in artistically interesting and culturally expansive ways,” Rosen said. “We see, at this early stage, a window into the future and an ability to help shape that future.”
Though Rosen admits that film is the foremost concern of the school, it strives to stay on the cutting-edge of technology.
“It’s easy to forget that in the 1890s, movies were a new media form before they became ubiquitous; soon, interactive media that didn’t exist before will be everywhere,” Rosen said. “So we want to be there during the pioneering years.”