Computer Science and Video Games: Teaching and Research in Higher Education

Graham Morgan

Visiting Professor
Department of Computer Science
George Mason University

Abstract

This talk will be on how links with the video games industry can strengthen research and teaching in universities. Considering the market worth of commercial video games one may be surprised to find that collaboration between academics and their industrial counterparts
in the games industry is not common. Consequently, computer science graduates tend not to satisfy game industry programming requirements and gaming studios rarely interact with universities. To overcome such a scenario requires time and effort, but the rewards of
collaboration between the video games industry and universities can be significant in terms of student teaching and research initiatives.

Speaker Bio

Graham Morgan gained his PhD in the area of distributed systems and continues to work in this area, creating tools and techniques to ease
the development of highly available Internet applications. Over the past few years the video games industry presented a series of case
studies which Graham used to highlight his distributed systems work. Working with the games industry in the UK, Graham has created a number of university level courses and programs to help ensure students are sufficiently qualified to succeed in the video game industry.