The video game industry is currently one of the biggest multimedia industries today, earning billions in revenue every year. Dr. Chris Branton is helping to prepare students for careers in this industry by being the first professor to teach Game Development at Drury University. The Scoop recently had a chance to talk to him about how he came to assume this position.

So how did you come to be interested in Game Development?

I’ve always been a fan of games since almost I could ever hear the word games. I’ve been playing them, I’ve been enjoying them, I’ve kind of made a bit of a study of them, but also as a computer scientist and software developer this was an interest early on. Over the years I’ve become more interested in the interaction aspects of what makes software interesting and what makes games fun to play. All of this came together when I left the industry and went back to academia. I started doing research in advanced computer interaction in areas like tangible computing, mixed reality, those kind of things… and when this position came up at Drury, it really married my interest in computer science, my interest in interaction, and my love of games. It seemed perfect for me.

How do you like teaching Game Development at Drury?

I like it a lot! In some ways I enjoy teaching computer science in an environment that everyone is really interested in and pursuing. Very often you end up with a lot of assignments that, although informative about the computer science aspect of it, students may struggle in understanding why they may be relevant or engaging. It’s easy to have somebody who wants to build a game and then says “oh, I need to know something about vectors to be able to calculate the way that these collisions work. I better learn some linear algebra!” I just find that much more enjoyable than trying to convince people why they need to know the things we’re trying to teach them.

Do you feel that it’s important to know Game Development in today’s day and age?

Oh absolutely. I talk to a lot of prospective students and parents about this. Not all and maybe not even the majority of our graduates are going to end up building games as we understand them in a traditional sense. What they’re going to do is take the skills they learn in how to make software engaging or how to create animations, or how to make VR applications, on and on and on, the kind of cutting-edge stuff that they work about. They’re going to apply that to some domain that they care about, whether its medicine or national security, humanities, business. These kinds of technologies are where computing is going to go.

Is there any advice that you would give to anyone that is looking to get into game development?

I would say game development is interactive storytelling; a way to be creative with modern media. Give it a try.