[game_edu] FW: Call for Applications: Playable Media-focused MFA at UC Santa Cruz

[S. Gold]

-- 
Susan Gold
goldfile at gmail.com

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
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------ Forwarded Message
From: Christine Imai <danm at UCSC.EDU>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:58:05 -0800
Subject: Call for Applications: Playable Media-focused MFA at UC Santa Cruz

Contact: Felicia Rice, Program Manager, 831-459-1554, danm at ucsc.edu

PLAYABLE MEDIA -- A NEW RESEARCH FOCUS AT UC SANTA CRUZ DIGITAL ARTS
AND NEW MEDIA MFA PROGRAM

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).

More about DANM:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/

More about Playable Media:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/PlayableMedia

Application information:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/ApplicationInfo

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