Off to college to major in ... video games?

"There's a generational divide," says James Paul Gee, an education professor and author of "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy." "Students ... see [games] as connected to society. But baby-boom faculty ... tend to be opposed or see them as trivial. They don't realize how closely tied [games] are to computer simulations used to model environments of all kinds."

At a video-game study room not far from Dr. Gee's office, students play and analyze the appeal and design of games such as "Grand Theft Auto" and "Everquest." "I'm interested in how games use learning principles," Gee says. "Think about it. Your standard computer game can take 50 hours to play. Imagine if a student loved spending 50 hours learning a language. We have a lot to learn from video games."

He predicts that video-game research will grow as colleges hire a new generation of professors who grew up playing video games.

The games seem to be catching the attention of serious academic researchers. Online academic journals like Game Studies solicit erudite-sounding treatises such as "Interaction Forms and Communicative Actions in Multi Player Games." or "Computer Games as a Part of Children's Culture." The Chronicle of Higher Education this week hosted an online debate over the merits of video games as teaching tools.

More such research will boom, says Janet Murray at Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. "There is this critical need for the game designers of the future to be broadly educated in the liberal arts," she says. "It's not surprising that several people working in game design at higher levels hold degrees in film."

The video-game industry is eager for higher education to respond, foreseeing huge demand for talented workers. " 'Mario' has made twice the revenue of all the 'Star Wars' movies combined, so it would seem to me that academia should absolutely be engaged in this area," says UC Irvine's Dr. Pearce.

The "image problem" for academia has abated, even in the past five years, says Jason Della Rocca of the International Game Developers Association. More than 200 people came to an academic conference IGDA hosted last year.

For Todd Booth, though, it's all about the game. A fine-arts graduate of Oregon State University, he is newly enrolled in SMU's video-game design program. Bored in high school, he says he wants to create educational software as entertaining and compelling as the multiplayer online games he played in college.

"We'd be playing 'Starcraft,' you know, and you'd have your dorm-room door open, and someone would yell, 'Ah, you just smashed my station,' " he says. "We'd be battling into the wee hours of the morning. Well, I really think education software could be that much fun. It just hasn't been very successful yet."

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