Kingston University sign-up

TIGA, the trade association representing the UK games industry,today announced Kingston University as its newest member.

This year Kingston University has launched a suite of six new courses designed to meet the UK’s digital media skills gap. The courses are designed to breakdown the boundaries between arts, science, education and industry to ensure synergy between teaching, research, enterprise and the marketplace and to provide an industry-focused learning experience. The courses have been created with input from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Samsung Design Europe and Dreamworks and are designed to foster the development of specialist skills whilst working as part of a team on industry focused projects.

The courses are run by Digital Media Kingston an interdisciplinary project that spans four of the university faculties, Art & Design, Maths & Computing, Social Sciences and Technological Sciences. The six courses are: MA and MSc User Experience Design; MA and MSc 3D CGI and MA and MSc Games Development.

Karen Cham, Development Coordinator for Digital Media Kingston, explains the organisations’ reasons for joining TIGA: “The new courses are all about closing the gap between education and industry and ensuring students leave university with the skills they need to work in the digital media sector. We are reaching out to the games industry, not only for guidance, but to create a dialogue between the two worlds. By developing research and development links our internationally recognised expertise in areas like design practice and computer vision can truly benefit the industry by feeding directly into enhancing the sector as a whole.”

In early November, these new postgraduate students start problem solving team project briefs by using brain computer interface technologies, stereographic 3D and locative media systems. As a pump primer they first have an industry saturation week with guests including Harvey Wheaton from Supermassive on production eco-systems and Dr. Sylivian Liege from Liemur on how great people ruin good projects.

Karen adds: “Our aim is not to just mimic what’s happening now but generate what happens next.”

Dr. Richard Wilson, TIGA CEO stated: “TIGA now has over 25 University members as well as training specialists and distance learning providers in its membership. We are committed to helping academics work closely with the industry through our education exchange initiative and specialist education focused events. We are delighted to welcome Kingston University to TIGA.”

The Kingston University is one of only 10 UK Universities that form Sony PlayStation’s new Academic Board, and will be attending the launch event at Develop Liverpool on November 23rd, 2010.

Ends

Notes to editors:

About TIGA:

TIGA is the trade association representing the UK’s games industry. The majority of our members are either independent games developers or in-house publisher owned developers. We also have games publishers, outsourcing companies, technology businesses and universities amongst our membership. TIGA was awarded ‘Trade Association of the Year’ and the ‘Member Recruitment Award’ at the Trade Association Forum Best Practice Awards 2010.

TIGA's vision is to make the UK the best place in the world to do games business.  We focus on three sets of activities: political representation, generating media coverage and developing services that enhance the competitiveness of our members.  This means that TIGA members are effectively represented in the corridors of power, their voice is heard in the media and they receive benefits that make a material difference to their businesses, including a reduction in costs and improved commercial opportunities.

For further information, please contact Eva Field, TIGA PR Manager on: 07814 039 983, or email eva@tiga.org .