Bioware Wednesday @ Bioware

In this week's Bioware Wednesday, Matt Deller, Obsidian Entertainment designer, is interviewed about his thoughts regarding game design. A regular at Neverwinter Connections as Poetic Colossus, this is a man who knows his subject.

We have featured a few articles on how Neverwinter Nights has been used in educational settings. Did those stories inspire you to try something in your school?

The University of Minnesota's interactive journalism modules and the Education Arcade's history modules certainly qualify as examples of innovation regarding the Aurora toolset and education. The University of Alberta's game development course has also been an inspiration, but to my knowledge, no high school per se has used Neverwinter's Aurora toolset to drive a game design course, the course being a rarity in itself.

Southern California is a Mecca for the video game industry. Several of the industry's top studios all reside within a 40 mile radius of our school site. This includes Blizzard, Obsidian, Electronic Arts, Rock Star Games, Pandemic, and more. Premier schools like UCLA and USC are now offering classes in Game Design. It just seemed to be a natural progression for a local high school to offer such a course.

Plus, the movies Serenity, Orange County, The Impostor, The Cell, and others were filmed on our campus, so we're already cool like that.

Read the rest here.
Source: Bioware