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My Kid Wants to Go to Digipen
February 12, 2008

My 16-year-old is mulling colleges, and career choices. High on his list are Redmond, WA Digipen University, which awards bachelor and masters degrees in video gaming technology, among other high tech subjects. 
Similar institutions, such as Flashpoint, are beginning to spring up around nexes of student populations interested in the next wave graphic media, or companies that need such workers.
As an old print guy, I was a little disappointed at first that print per se didn't have an appeal for him like it has for me. I wondered whether this arena was a reasonable career path.
Now I am seeing that it is part of the channels feeding talent to new media offerings. Is there print in this mix? Yes, indeed. This milieu includes elements such as graphic novels, comic books, video games and movies that pong themes, materials and story lines back and forth.
Some recent examples with historic and literary contexts include films like V for Vendetta, 300, or Beowulf that transform rapidly between media platforms--sometimes games driving movies, or film scripts that get novelized. 
Harry Potter is the top-of-mind example, book, movie, video games. But the transform increasingly runs in the other direction--video game (such as Tomb Raider), movie, books, even board games and magazines. The process goes well beyond shoot-em-up video gaming. In this media development cycle, complex back stories are created for the characters, who must have motivation and live within a story structure to maintain the interest of gamers for hours on end.
Consider the fact that five of the current top ten best selling novels in Japan were written on cell phones, driving print runs approaching half a million copies, and you can sense the new media possiblities.
Yes, indeed, my son's interests may turn out to be print-related--but it is a future print that is not isolated from other graphic communications platforms, and one that will be richer than those of the past.

Posted by Bill Esler on February 12, 2008 | Comments (0)