Michael Mateas looks even more smug than normal – and he should – in the photo accompanying this UC Santa Cruz press release. He’s the chair of the new Computational Media department at that UC school, the first of its sort.
My collaborator & friend Michael, along with my collaborator & friend Noah Wardrip-Fruin, have made good on the suggestions of the report “Envisioning the Future of Computational Media,” the outcome of an NEH-, NEA-, NSF-, and Microsoft-sponsored workshop of which I was a part, along with about 40 others.
I’m glad, too, that Michael expressed how, while games are a critical part of computational media, the field’s potential goes beyond the current state of computer and video gaming.
It looks like computational media has a great future in Santa Cruz!