Reasearch in Computer Games / Middleware

[DeleteMePlease]

Hey Guys,

 

I again need some little help looking for the right gradschool.

 

My research background is in comptuer networking, especially in peer to peer networks. But I am also very interested in game development. Especially middlewares/engines that power massive mulitplayer worlds.

I was wondering if there are any (good) school that do research in this area. I know there are many that do research in distributed systems or peer to peer networking, which would also be fine for me, but I don't find any that do research in this particular subfield.

 

Maybe you guys can help me?

 

Thanks!

[compiler_guy]

UC Santa Cruz has a specialized game development graduate program:

https://cs.soe.ucsc.edu/ms_gamesplayablemedia

 

But you could also do a PhD if you work with relevant faculty:

http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/research

 

University of South California has two types of degrees:

http://www.cs.usc.edu/academics/masters/msgames.htm

http://cinema.usc.edu/interactive/degrees.cfm

 

http://interactive.usc.edu/game-innovation-lab/

 

One is geared more towards the "fine arts".

 

Perhaps there are other universities with game development - try to search for schools that have good computer graphics focus.

[DeleteMePlease]

Thanks for the tip.

 

But those schools seem to focus on game design and AI. However, my interests are more towards development of (mulitplayer)game servers...

 

Not sure if it would be more wise for me to go to a school that has a focus on networks and (distributed)systems.

[compiler_guy]

Game servers is probably a sub-field of "Systems research", which is a field of computer science that deals with how to make computer systems better and more efficient. See:

http://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/mscs/specializations/

 

I haven't heard of a university that has even a course, workshop or degree specialization in "game servers" . Probably because from a technical viewpoint, "game servers" are very similar to regular servers that deal with a lot of bandwidth traffic (like at google, youtube.. ). So as a researcher you don't have any special incentive to tackle specific research problems with "game servers". You just research servers and such systems.

[DeleteMePlease]

Yes that is basically what I thought too. Maybe the best for me would be to choose a school that has a good systems/networking background and isn't that small. So I may easier find an adviser that lets me research in that field.

 

I am extremely interested in persistent online worlds with many (10.000+) players. I think such kind of distributed systems are a little different to lets say web servers, as there is a lot of data that needs to be synchronized. 

I also found some papers on peer to peer online games, but not much...

Edited May 22, 2013 by GermanStudent

[DeleteMePlease]

Any suggestions on schools? Should I just go after the "Systems" rankings?

[compiler_guy]

Don't rely on rankings alone. Be sure to visit the web pages of researchers in those schools. Also you might want to check out if they are looking for new students.