Prologue: What is This Gaming University?
How would you imagine an academic programme, which is all about gaming? Would you love to do that? The whole idea sounds a bit crazy first, but it is not if we analyze the world around us. Today, the video gaming industry generates more profit than the formerly leading music industry, and it is still on the rise. Games are created everywhere, by everyone and for everyone. Casual gamers buy Angry Birds, some others play MMOs, while another group plays with Wii Fit or Kinect. You can find all kinds of gamers and games for pure enjoyment.
However, the old-school game design, with original ideas is getting more and more out of the focus. Most (formerly successful) series created some years ago have their new parts released each year, and they are selling well because of their predecessors only. Think about the Final Fantasy series, about Call of Duty, or the Heroes series. These games invented something new but they are not evolving anymore. Currently, it is not a problem for the gaming industry, but in the long run, fresh ideas will be needed so that the whole sector can get a new push.
That is why some very smart young scholars and professors created the Gaming University (or GUni for short) in 2005. Most of the founders came from MIT, and they decided to relocate their ideal university next to California State University. They did it because the Silicon Valley is much closer to that, and their idea was more related to gaming than to conventional research and development (which MIT specialized on). The university was a huge success, thanks to its originality and its good location. Thousands of students applied for the programme called "Creative Design."
The founders' idea was to fill in the gap between game developers and game designers. Since developers mainly deal with practical tasks and designers simply execute these concepts (the graphics and the system), there is no one left to concentrate specifically on the background of a game. That is when a creative designer comes into the picture. The emphasis is on the "creative" part, obviously. Creativity means – in this case – that the whole game is observed, not just certain parts of it. Creative designers may suggest the modification of story elements, character abilities, names, everything. Their task is to see everything in a game, to know every detail of it. What is more, they must create new ideas which fit into the already created game. That is the hardest challenge of all.
So, thanks to stable funding and good international relations (mainly with Japan and South Korea), GUni managed to gather 1500 students for its "Creative Designer" academic programme in the past 5 years. As a private institution, it turned profitable in just 3 years and now it employs almost 100 professors specialized on different fields of gaming. Most of them are experts of RPGs, but there are some others in strategy games, shooters, or fighting games (especially from Japan). The median age of lecturers is only 31.5 years which shows how young and talented they are.
In our story, we will have the chance to get a glimpse of how some of the students try and earn their 180 credits in Creative Design, and therefore receive their special degree before entering the gaming industry. The story will focus on a special set of courses which are about the Soul Series (Soul Calibur games).