Twenty years ago, the most popular video games were made by teenage computer gurus in their spare time. With a knack for computer programming and some enthusiasm, anybody could be making the next best game.

Not anymore. The video-game industry has evolved: Today's games have multimillion-dollar budgets and large, dedicated teams. These changes demand a new mindset for educating the next generation of game programmers, said Chris McEvoy, chief technical officer of Vicarious Visions, a game-development studio in Albany, N.Y., and keynote speaker at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) St. Lawrence Section Conference, held at Cornell, Nov. 17-18.

The two-day event brought together faculty members, industry leaders and students from New York state and Canada to discuss engineering education. To Cornell participants, McEvoy's keynote resonated with those who worked to establish the new minor degree in game design, offered in the Department of Computer Science for the first time this year.

"We have to look at game development through the lens of software development, like Microsoft Word," said McEvoy, who believes that making today's complex games requires project management skills because developers no longer work alone. "For game programmers, their clients are the artists, animators and producers. They have to produce tools for these guys to recreate their visions of how the game should be."

McEvoy said that higher education can help game programmers excel in their evolving role. "The requirements of what makes a game fun are not well-defined, so not everything in school is applicable. But people should come out of school with the right mindset, one of continuous improvement," said McEvoy, who suggested one way of learning the right material is for the game-development community to publish their work and to exchange ideas with academia.

Recently, several colleges have started to offer game-design degrees, but McEvoy claimed that some courses lack the necessary depth. "One thing often missing is a good theoretical foundation. You are going to learn all these algorithms, but not the theories, which bind them together," said McEvoy, who thought if given a solid background, students could learn how to learn.

Moreover, university game-design classes must teach sound practices for writing computer programs. "Cowboy programmers," those who could pull off magical pieces of computer code until minutes before a deadline, are a dying breed as games become massive development projects. "Students should understand the value of rigor and understand the value of good software development processes," he said.

The keynote lecture was introduced by Frank Huband '60, ASEE's executive director, who echoed McEvoy's call for educating engineers, in general, who can learn and adapt.

"With globalization, with needs for diversity, with environmental issues, with law, entrepreneurship and business squeezed into undergraduate programs, we would need 12 years to teach good engineers, using traditional teaching modalities, and in another five years they won't be good anymore," said Huband, who pointed out the challenges in teaching new engineers.

The conference was organized by a committee led by David Schwartz, chair of the regional ASEE section and director of the Game Design Initiative at Cornell. With multiple discussion panels in two days, the meeting aimed to give faculty members new ideas for classroom teaching and to give industry leaders an opportunity to learn about engineering education.

Graduate student Alex Kwan is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.