"The world, as usual, is more complex than we'd like it to be," said Georgia Tech Ian Bogost, addressing concerns that an amateur video game based on the Columbine massacre inspired a 25-year-old man to go on a shooting rampage in Montreal on Wednesday.

Bogost, interviewed by CTV, added, "Certainly, (the shooter) was using media of all kinds to culture his antisocial fantasies. Should we hold (this game) responsible? Clearly, these are overly simplistic explanations."

Bogost has much more on the Dawson shooting on his Water Cooler Games website.
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Yesterday's GamePolitics coverage of a Depauw University prof's vicious slamming of video game design degrees generated a slew of comments and even managed to get Slashdotted.

This morning we find the opposing view in a reprint of a Los Angeles Times article which surveys university programs in video game design. The piece ranks Georgia Tech, the University of Central Florida, Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Southern California among the best such programs.

"Our program thrives on students having multiple passionate backgrounds and they inevitably come up with wacky stuff," said USC's Scott Fisher, chair of the interactive media division. The program's first class of six students graduated in the spring.

"Our curriculum is built around getting people to learn more about how to work together," said Randy Pausch, co-director of Carnegia-Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. The school has contracts with EA and Activision to hire grads of the program.

Henry Jenkins (left) of MIT was also interviewed for the article.

"If you look at the games sector," Jenkins said, "what you see historically is they've hired two groups of people: programmers and graphic artists. But games are becoming a storytelling and entertainment medium. Neither of those groups have the vocabulary to talk to each other very well because they come from much different worlds. We're training technologists to think like entertainers. In the same way film schools changed Hollywood, game studies will change the games industry."