Playing video games is no longer just a pastime of young boys. Now it's also homework for American college students.
Thanks to the growing place of games in mainstream entertainment, universities across the United States are offering classes in video game design, hoping to teach students skills for a career in a business that generates roughly as much revenue as Hollywood's domestic box office receipts.
Later this year, students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York - internationally known for its mathematicians and engineering programmes - can study video game studies, said Kathleen Ruiz, co-director of the new programme.
"Games are an important part of culture and are here to stay," said Ruiz, a digital artist who teaches a class where students play and design video games.
Her class will be included in the new programme, and students will work on games that get away from traditional "shooter" games, which largely focus on war, and criminal adventure games like the popular "Grand Theft Auto".
The new programme is one of many at major universities across the country. The University of Southern California recently announced a partnership with the world's largest video game publisher, Electronic Arts, to create a programme in video game design that will offer a master's degree in fine arts. Other institutions offering classes in video game studies include Princeton, Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institution of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine. There are also specialised schools, like DigiPen in Redmond, Washington, that teach nothing but game design.
Now that more women are playing video games, they also are entering the video gaming field as designers and programmers, said Ralph Noble, associate professor of cognitive science who will be incorporating some of his psychology classes for the game studies programme, which will involve 100 students. Contrary to popular assumptions about game players, the average age of regular gamers is 29, and statistically, there are more women over the age of 18 playing games than teenage boys.
Games like "The Sims", where players build virtual people who live in a vast world with families, friends, houses and entertainment events, have made video games more enticing to a wider audience than young boys, Ruiz said.
Noble said the industry is struggling to devise new games with mass appeal. As a result, he and Ruiz hope their students will design the video games of the future.