King Arthur pulled Excalibur from the stone, Thor wielded his mighty hammer, and the UCLA Game Lab has the Eli Broad sword ““ or at least a couple drawings of it on its walls and door. Both a reference to the building that houses the Design | Media Arts department and old school role-playing games like “Dungeons & Dragons” and the “Final Fantasy” series, the sword has become a playful symbol of the Game Lab.
Legendary swords aside, the lab team, jointly shared between the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, has the opportunity to show off its real mettle as it participates in the first annual Intermural Game Carnival, an event the Game Lab sponsored. Students who have taken game design classes and those involved with the Game Lab will present board games and video games alongside creations by designers from USC and UC Irvine.
The event functions dually as an academic exchange and an artistic showcase. Visitors will be able to see game demonstrations and actually play the games themselves. Interactivity is the central tenet of both video and board games, said Bryan Wuest, a Game Lab research assistant and cinema and media studies graduate student.
“The Game Carnival is for everyone. You don’t have to be a programmer or think of yourself as a game expert. At the basis, they are games so they’re there for you to come and have fun and play with,” Wuest said.
David Elliott, manager of the Game Lab and event organizer, described some of the participants’ contributions from multi-player iPad applications to a game called “Monkey Soup,” which uses a costume as a game controller.
Peter Lu, a fourth-year mathematics student concurrently enrolled as a graduate mathematics student, talked about one of the largest installations coming to the Game Carnival, the “Outrun” car, engineered by Fulbright scholar and UC Irvine artist in residence, Garnet Hertz.
“The project itself is an actual go-kart that moves, but instead of having a windshield, it has a monitor that is running a modified or recreated version of a video game called “˜Outrun,’ which was one of the first fake 3-D racing games,” said Lu, who also is a Game Lab research assistant.
The opportunity to see the work from other campuses like Hertz’s is one of the event’s big selling points, according to Wuest.
“We don’t have an actual MFA in game design, so it’s cool that we can act as a center to bring together these places that do have game design programs and be neutral territory (to) show their games,” Wuest said.
Even without a degree-oriented program that focuses on game design, UCLA offers many courses in both the computer science and Design | Media Arts departments that allow students to create their own games. Eddo Stern, director of the Game Lab and Design | Media Arts professor, teaches three of these classes, focusing on board games, computer games and physical interfaces, like arcade machines.
“The focus on the lab is on creative game production and development from an artistic point of view,” Stern said. “Our approach to gaming is really as wide open as it could possibly be, with the hope of making it even wider.”
Stern said the Game Carnival is rather modest in size for its inaugural year but aims to expand next year to include more schools. He also said the event is an opportunity to grow within the UCLA community.
“I really encourage students and faculty from all different walks of life here on campus to come and contribute to game development because it’s such an open field. We’d love to work with psychiatrists, psychologists, engineers, biologists, writers, theorists, historians, everything,” Stern said. “All those combinations of people and interests have the potential to produce interesting new games.”