What led to the graduate certificate program in video game engineering?
Braude: A few years ago, I took a cursory look at the number of video game companies in New England. I thought there wouldn’t be too many, given our image as stodgy old Yankees. But there are actually tons of video game companies in this region, and it’s a very active and growing industry everywhere. In fact, it’s bigger than the motion picture industry in the United States. In 2006, we visited an existing graduate certificate program in game development at Southern Methodist University, and I started discussions on setting up something here with Lou Chitkushev, MET associate professor and chair of computer science, and Ian Davis, who is a luminary computer scientist and a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in video games. He started a company called Mad Doc software in Lawrence, Mass, and it grew into a significant company and was recently bought by Rockstar Games. We enrolled our first students in the certificate program in the spring of 2008. Why is the video game busines
