New classes focusing on video game design and production will be available in the fall 2024 semester at El Camino College.
Having been planned over the course of a year and a half, “Games and Playable Media” has been added to the college’s curriculum, with the hiring requirements of new faculty one of the agenda items during the Academic Senate meeting on Tuesday, May 7.
Games and Playable Media is a career technical education program that will teach students the development and making of video games. This includes students making their own programs to play.
The addition of game courses is seen positively by student gamers on campus, like 22-year-old engineering major Oscar Madera.
“I’m glad they’re finally incorporating it into the school,” Madera, who is also a student worker at the Warrior Esports Center in the Schauerman Library, said. “I mean, it’s been a booming market since like, way before any of us were even outside our diapers.”
In the fall 2024 semester, the program will offer its first classes on GPM-100 and GPM-110, whose course descriptions are not currently available, with more added in the semesters after.
Classes providing students with stackable certificates and a full associate’s degree are in the works as well.
The new program will also come with a new educational division of the same name and work with multiple other existing divisions, Distance Education Faculty Coordinator Moses Wolfenstein said.
“The Games and Playable Media Department is pretty unique because of the fact that it is inherently interdivisional,” Wolfenstein said. “We’re working with faculty currently in fine arts, specifically digital art… and computer science, and then we will also be working with faculty in business.”
Wolfenstein, who is also the chair of the Library Learning Resources Division curriculum committee and an avid gamer himself, said he was approached by the Dean of Health Sciences and Athletics Russell Serr in 2021 about advising the Warrior ESports Club.
“They were looking for an advisor and he’d heard that I knew something about games, and they didn’t have any faculty to advise them otherwise,” Wolfenstein said. “…I volunteered to advise them because I was like, ‘Sure, I do know quite a lot about games.’”
Advising the club as it changed its name to the Warrior Gaming Club, Wolfenstein talked with El Camino President Brenda Thames about games and education.
“The topic of curriculum came up and she said, ‘Let’s move forward with making games [part of the] curriculum,’” Wolfenstein said.
However, as Wolfenstein is pioneering into a new educational territory, there has been some roadblocks in getting classes set up.
Because the field is so new to the educational world, master’s degrees that help with hiring candidates aren’t available, Academic Senate Vice President of Educational Policies Darcie McClelland said in a presentation during the meeting.
“It’s a [Career and Technical Education] field and master’s degrees are not generally available in this field, and that’s pretty common,” McClelland said. “We have many [Career and Technical Education] disciplines at this campus where we have alternative minimum qualifications because you generally cannot get a master’s degree in that area.”
The alternate requirements were suggested to be either any bachelor’s degree and two years of professional experience or any associate’s degree and six years of professional experience.
