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T A B L E__T A L K

Riven and Myst fans discuss their passion in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
The case of the hijacked haiku
(02/24/98)

Schools of hard knocks
By Andrew Leonard
"Lock ups" for "defiant teens" use questionable tactics -- on the Web and off
(02/23/98)

21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Challenge No. 6: Find-and-replace goofs
Plus: results of our "Ticklers" challenge
(02/20/98)

Caught in the headlights
By Aaron Weiss
What if we were as paranoid about cars as we are of the Net?
(02/19/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Once more, into the interactive-TV breach
(02/18/98)

BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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BY MOIRA MULDOON | "Why is it fun?"

That's not a question often asked at institutions of higher learning. But at DigiPen Institute of Technology -- the college of video game programming in Redmond, Wash. -- it's a mantra written on dry-erase boards all over the building, a query thrust at students again and again at each stage of a project.

DigiPen is housed in an edifice that looks far more corporate than collegiate. Every minute of students' time is accounted for in 10-hour days. Normal college activities like keggers, touch football on the quad and dorm dances are conspicuously absent. All of which makes one wonder: Is DigiPen itself fun? This school for game developers seems like an awful lot of work.

It's a Friday in January at DigiPen -- only the second week the U.S. campus has been open -- and 40 would-be video game programmers are prepping presentations of ideas for new games. Claude Comair, a Lebanese man of extraordinary energy and the president of DigiPen, is explaining that the students are in the initial stages of their first project, a puzzle game. It's a process that will be repeated each semester at DigiPen. The second semester project is a side-scrolling game (like "Super Mario Bros."), the third a single-player strategy game, and so on.

One group has created a puzzle about a potato trying to find its way home. Rilla Jaggia, a former assistant professor of finance at the University of Massachusetts and current video game student, shows me preliminary sketches of levels -- the green will be trees and forests, that X might be a bridge -- and characters for players to help home.

Potatoes are a far cry from finance, but Jaggia is excited about the outline of the game. "I was searching for a career that would involve both my artistic skills as well as my love for mathematics," she says. "I love music, I love to paint. I wanted to put them all together ... so I wanted a school that would allow me to make my own interactive graphics."

Jaggia doesn't fit the stereotype of the gamer and, in fact, by gamer definitions, she isn't one. She's played adventure games like "Riven" and "Zork" and is anxious to find a few hours to begin "The Curse of Monkey Island," but she hasn't lived and breathed games all her life. She's the exception.

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N E X T_P A G E | Where hard-core gamers get what they want