On the Exhibition of GEIDAI GAMES 03

In this year's exhibition of the Games program, we present three thesis projects and three first-year works. Each of them is the result of exploring games as art and is demonstrating the direction for which the Graduate School of Film and New Media should follow. Other exhibited works include projects made by our graduates and prototypes from the Geidai-USC collaboration program. The exhibition as a whole represents the depth and width of the current Games program. One notable achievement is the game Small Life (Yueqi Wu, 2021) which has been nominated for Best Student Game at the Independent Games Festival 2022. Such honorable acknowledgment will indeed boost the international presence of our Games program.

At Tokyo University of the Arts, games are recognized as an emerging field of the arts. Since cultivating the games genre goes hand in hand with digital technology, it is also serving as a driving force in advancing the digitization of the entire university's education and research environment. As we expand our Digital Twin initiative and virtual interaction, we will be exploring collaboration across campuses and exhibition styles that are no longer restricted to a physical location. We will continue to pursue games as a form of art and simultaneously lay a solid foundation as an organization dedicated to research and education.

A Multifaceted Games Education

Every Friday at 10 am, we meet in Zoom for a seminar that we call the Games Study Group. There are six students; four second-year Master’s and two first-years. Six faculty members also join this meeting (of which one is currently on maternity leave). When students are absent or still asleep, we end up in a somewhat awkward situation where there are quite a few more teachers than students.

In this seminar, each student reports on the progress of their project and the faculty gives feedback and advice based on their expertise, usually in these areas:
Okamoto (Dept. of Animation) - concept/narrative/visual structuring
Kiriyama (Dept. of New Media) - programming, media art
Tokita (Square Enix) - professional game design, game industry
Eguchi - translation, localization
Maki - VR/360-degree imaging
Matsumoto - music, composing

Games are argued as an integrated art form. Story, visuals, movement, composition, sound effects, music, texts… everything entangled in a complex mass to offer content never experienced before. And, because it is a genre that originated in the industry, a lot of the know-how is stored in a business environment and not academia. Therefore, to teach game creation, the above method of incorporating a multitude of specialties seems perfectly reasonable. It requires a different education system than the master-apprentice approach commonly found in the more traditional art disciplines.

The games field will continue to evolve rapidly with the advancement in ICT. In such a world, education too needs reorganizing and the willingness to venture outside university pedagogy.