Interactive Games and Media

The School of IGM will host a node of the Global Game Jam on January 27-29. As in previous years, you should expect mayhem, madness, and a whole lot of great games! In addition this year, we are also co-locating and co-hosting an event around the National STEM Video Game Challenge on Saturday January 28, and we’re excited that these two events will allow RIT students with experiences in game design and development to interact with local area high school students pursuing the STEM challenge. Our sincere thanks to WXXI, the IGDA, the Golisano College of Computing & Information Sciences, and to all of RIT for helping to make these events a reality.

IGM was the recent host of an Imagine Cup event Dec. 2-4 in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. In addition to the competition, Saturday included a daylong crash course in XNA, courses on mobile development using a Windows Phone, and seminars on HTML5 and its use in game construction. You can find out more through the university press coverage of the event. Many thanks both to Microsoft for generously partnering with us on this event as well as to all of the IGM faculty and staff that made this a reality! WOOT!

We're delighted to announce that Professor Elizabeth Lawley recently presented our work on the Just Press Play project at the MIT Civic Games conference in Boston. You can read a write-up of the event here. Also, the JPP project was recenty featured in a Microsoft tech blog here.

Microsoft Research Connections featured the Just Press Play project on their research blog today, and also uploaded an incredible video reviewing the JPP lanuch featuring several faculty and students from IGM as well as the Provost and President of RIT! Check it out!

Well, our Video Game Mania presence is over, and it went great! Many thanks to the National Museum of Play for allowing us to participate, and to the RIT Center for Student Innovation for partnering with us on this initiative. We had a great time reaching out to the public with some of our crazy ideas, and showed everything from traditional game development to the crazy work the School is doing using things like rubber balls and drumsticks as game controllers. Many thanks to IGM Associate Professors Jacobs, Jackson and Schwartz who helped make this possible, as well as our students who participated.

Happy All Hallows Eve to our ghoulish friends and colleagues - what are we up to this year? Oh, just the first of the flash-mobs for Just Press Play! In honor of the occasion several dozen RIT students and Associate Professor Elouise Oyzon from the School of Interactive Games & Media have been working hard to organize a rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller, complete with custom choreography, down in the RIT Global Village. It went off without a hitch today with several folks earning the 'Thriller' achievement in the game, and many more just had a strange and wonderful Halloween experience! Trick-or-Treat!

Friends of the School of Interactive Games and Media are invited to a celebration as they hear from the school director, Professor Andrew Phelps. He taught the first course in "game programming" at RIT 10 years ago, and has been highly involved with the new media interactive development program during this period as well. Don't miss this opportunity to learn about the past, present, and future of games and interactive media at RIT, to celebrate with our partners at Microsoft and Dell/Alienware, and to reflect on both the progress we've made over the past decade as well as hear about plans for the future. There will also be several surprise announcements you won't want to miss!

The Tiger ROAR, a downloadable app now available for Android smart phones, features the RIT Athletics tiger logo that “roars” when the phone is shaken or its screen is touched. With the deaf and hard-of-hearing community in mind, the screen flashes and the phone vibrates as the tiger roars.

The app was created to be used at RIT hockey games and other RIT sporting events. Available for download at roar.rit.edu, the app is expected to be offered in the Android Market and iTunes App Store in the near future. More information is available in the university news article.

Representatives from Microsoft will visit the Rochester Institute of Technology campus on Oct. 13 for the launch of Just Press Play. The new game system, developed by RIT faculty, staff and students in the School of Interactive Games and Media, is made possible by the support of Microsoft Research Connections. See the University News Story for more information, and be sure to check out the coverage in the Democrat and Chronicle.

Each year, the RIT Staff Council presents a series of campus-wide awards to staff members who have gone above and beyond in providing exceptional service and contributions to RIT. This year, IGM is delighted as we congratulate the outstanding individual and team nominees and announce that our own Jennifer Hinton received a 2011 Staff Excellence Award! Congratulations to Jenn for this recognition, we are so very grateful to have her on our team! Many congratulations and our appreciation to all of the other recipients and nominees as well, and to the staff at large for continuing to make RIT so wonderful.