Just five years after one professor pioneered the creation of a video game design program at UNM, the program is revered as one of the best in the continent.
In 2007, Professor Pradeep Sen, who holds a PhD from Stanford University, founded UNM’s video game design program. This year, Princeton Review listed UNM’s program as one of the top-10 video game design programs in North America.
Sen, an assistant professor from the electrical and computer engineering department, arrived at UNM in the fall of 2006. He said he came to UNM determined to do something new that would appeal to a younger generation of students.
“I wanted to find something unique to recruit students and get people excited,” he said. “That is why I focused on video game development as one way to do it.”
In addition to teaching classes for advanced video game development, Sen has directed and released three video games through the Xbox Live service: “Magnetic Defender,” “Toybox Racing” and “Marauder Madness!”
“Our video games have gotten tens of thousands of downloads, which is not bad for a program that is (made) by few students,” he said. “However, our goal is to be famous and make games that everybody in the world plays.”
Sen decided to come to UNM as an assistant professor because the state under former Gov. Bill Richardson was pouring money into digital media programs. However, when Sen arrived at UNM, he faced a new challenge: UNM did not have any program related to the creation of video games.
In order to achieve his goal, Sen co-founded the UNM Advanced Graphic Lab, AGL, where he also created the division of video games in 2007.
“This is something that I was particularly passionate about because UNM didn’t have either a program or such a big ranking in graphics when I came in,” he said.
Sen, who created his first video game at the age of 9, is also an expert in computer graphics research. Last year, he was the first professor at UNM to publish a research paper in SIGGRAPH, the largest conference on computer graphics in the world.
“SIGGRAPH is like the world cup, where every team wants to make it to the final,” he said. “This is the most competitive (computer graphics) conference and the top thing we can do is present papers there.”
Despite his current success on the video game program for undergraduates and his important research publication, Sen wants AGL to keep growing so UNM can stand in the world of computer graphics research.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
“This is a very powerful program because it has a lot of potential to appeal to mass audiences,” he said. “Moreover, developing video games accomplishes academic goals because you are educating developers and programmers for the current entertainment industry.”
