Playable Media: A New Research Focus at UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program; under the direction of Noah Wardrip-Fruin :: Applications Due February 15 for Fall 2009 Admission.

UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an MFA for artists working with computer games, software toys, interactive fictions, rhetorical simulations, and related playable forms. The university’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program has added Playable Media as a research focus for its collaborative faculty-student projects. Applications to the DANM MFA program for Fall 2009 are being accepted through February 15, and are encouraged from the broad diversity of artists who create work that invites and structures play.

The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research. At the core of the diverse DANM curriculum are collaborative research projects, in which small clusters of students work with professors on artistic, technical and theoretical research. Over the course of three quarters, these groups engage in the development of faculty-initiated research in one of four focused areas: Mechatronics, Participatory Culture, Performative Technologies, and Playable Media. These collaborations result in publications and exhibitions. In this intensive two-year program, students also take core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts, culminating in the development of individual thesis projects. These works are premiered in the program’s annual MFA exhibition. The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) is the terminal degree in the field of digital media arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and research.

In the Playable Media collaborative research group, MFA students will work with UCSC’s strong faculty in this area to understand and create new ways for computer games and related forms to engage audiences, make arguments, tell stories, and shape social space. Ongoing Playable Media work combines game design and artificial intelligence research with writing, art, and media authoring.

The Playable Media-focused Digital Arts and New Media MFA joins UCSC’s two previous degree options in this area. UCSC currently hosts the first computer game undergraduate major in the University of California system: a B.S. in computer game design through the Computer Science department. Active PhD research is also taking place in Computer Science, where students are developing underlying technologies for new genres of computer game play. It is expected that some DANM Playable Media students will collaborate with students in the existing programs in order to create projects more ambitious than would otherwise be possible.

The first Playable Media collaborative research group will be launched in 2009 under the direction of Noah Wardrip-Fruin (co-creator of the virtual reality literary game Screen, co-editor of MIT Press books such as Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media). Other UCSC faculty in this area include Michael Mateas (co-creator of Independent Games Festival finalist Facade and the interactive film generator Terminal Time), Warren Sack (creator of the argumentation game Agonistics and the social technology Conversation Map), and Jim Whitehead (founder of the UC system’s first game degree, developer of novel techniques for game level generation).