Game industry veteran Tracy Fullerton has been selected to lead the University of Southern California's new
USC Games program, which combines courses in engineering, art and design into a curriculum for students looking to enter the game industry.
Fullerton is the first director of the new program, and has been teaching at USC since 1999. Prior to her appointment as director of USC Games she was heavily involved with USC's Interactive Media & Games Division within the university's School of Cinematic Arts, where she led the experimental Game Innovation Lab.
Students from that program have gone on to work on games like
Journey,
The Cat and the Coup and
Threes.
Now Fullerton is expected to work more closely with other USC departments in her efforts to lead USC's game design education program. To that end, the new USC Games program will include courses from the Interactive Media & Games Division and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Computer Science.
“If you think about how games will be used in medicine, healthcare, education, politics and social activism, we need to open up a lot more in our view,” said Fullerton in an interview about the program published in the
Los Angeles Times last week. “This is the beginning of that. We’ve been doing it unofficially, but this is us leveling up our program to be more outward facing, more collaborative.”
