Well, why not? If film-making can be a major, and video games make more money than movies, it only makes sense to educate people in how to make them.

I'm not going to pay $3 to read the article, but: video game programming is a lot different from from developing in-house business software. It's closer to developing consumer software, but it's still different.

In VGP, you need to deal with graphics, playing sounds, storyline stuff, even "AI."

With consumer software, you need to worry about all the bad things that could happen, and you need to pay attention to all the small details. Otherwise people might think the product is bad or make lots of support calls.

With business software, you don't need to worry about the user experience so much, but you do need to worry about things like security and making sure that you don't corrupt data. If two users try to update a record in a shared database at the same time, that could have serious repurcussions if it's not handled correctly.

And, those are different from HTML "programmers" and those who write the back end of websites.

Wanting to create a video game major is similar to the multimedia major craze of the last cycle.

Creating a video game major is a stupid idea. It would be better to teach people about things like database integrity *and* about things like creating software to draw things on the screen. That would create well-rounded developers who could learn specialized techniques through books and on the job.

Lonewacko, click on the link. It's free.

It wasn't free for me either, KB.

If USC is serious about video game design, they should take it out of the engineering school's control and send it over to the cinema or media schools, because I suspect what makes video games so sophomoric is that screenwriters, graphic artists and directors play second string to the engineers and marketers.

Maybe the aesthetic stigma of a hand-held controller will keep video games from ever rising to art.

It's being considered as a minor. Not a major.

I suspect there's a cookie involved here or something. When I click on the link I get:

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All the classes are actually in place. And they're in the Information Technology(ITP) department, which is open to students of all majors not just engineers. The classes in fact do have a very high artistic component involved. DG sounds like all the pompous film students here that think that somehow making crappy films makes them better than everyone else, when in fact they are the ones that are spitting up more regurgitated drivel then any other humanity department. And I dont think that your statement about screenwriters, graphic artists playing second fiddle is accurate at all. The programming aspect, at this point, is something that is molded to whatever the artists and screenwriters want to get accomplished