All Ahead Full

This is a weekly experience blog by Richelle Rueda focusing on the 2014-2015 post graduate program at the Denis-Sams Gaming Academy at the University of Texas in Austin. The official site for the program can be found here: http://moody.utexas.edu/gaming-academy.  It will be separated into comments about the program, school, city, etc. to the best of this writer’s ability but it is all through on particular perspective and results may vary from person to person. Average age of the program seems to fall somewhere in the mid-twenties with a variety of backgrounds ranging from years of work experience to freshly out of school. Information about all of the students for the class this year can be found here: http://moody.utexas.edu/gaming-academy/inaugural-class.

Week One:

                Orientation too place on Tuesday. The majority of the twenty students and three of the faculty met the day before class. We were walked to our future class location. The lab is small but pretty. Each computer station has a beautiful tower and duel monitors. The Wacom cintiqs have not yet arrived, but all the equipment is new and in top form. The building’s hours of operation have unfortunately truncated the hours of availability of these labs though. The building closes at 11 pm each night which has made for an unusual situation given the nocturnal nature of many of the students. This may end up being for the best in the sense that it forces students to go home and encourages regular sleep hours. The down side will certainly be the lack of safety net that a 24 hour lab provides during crunch time.

Also on Tuesday, we took a few tours. The forty acres tour focused on the original forty acres of the U of T campus. While our tour guide was upbeat and surprisingly energetic, the majority of the time was spent looking for shade and somewhere to sit in the heat of the day. The Texas weather did not disappoint in delivering both scorching heat and intense humidity. We visited the video game archives on campus which were, like most buildings, wonderfully air conditioned. The archives also offered an opportunity to look over design documents, original art pieces, and play a few games that predate many of the students in the program.  

The first day of class was focused on ice breakers and introductions. Since the class size is large we did a variation on the two truths and a lie turning it into two lies and a truth. The class was able to vote on which of the three statements was true for each person to some rather amusing results.

Lectures, which were approximately two hours each morning starting at 10 pm, expanded on the first reading assignment, an excerpt from "Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge" about leadership from the writings of Warren Bennis and Burt Manus. These discussions opened debate on what are the important characteristics of leaders and the differences between management and leadership.

After lunch each day has been devoted to lab time. The class of twenty students were divided into four teams of five for the sake of a game jam. The teams were arranged by the faculty in an effort to evenly divide the disciplines among the team. The theme of this jam was 1,000 things. The assignment is due on Tuesday but already all the games seem distinctly different from each other. Now heading into the second week, each game jam team is focused on polishing their game for presentation over the three day weekend.

                A few notes about the city of Austin immediately around the school. Guadalupe Street, also known locally as the drag, has many small restaurants which are by in large reasonably priced for the student budget. There are however many homeless on this street that can be very aggressive when asking for money or food. Also aggressive on the drag are various religious figures handing out bibles. Personally it is this writer’s opinion that it is rather intrusive to have a number of people on my walk to class step into my path to stop me and then thrust a book towards me.