White Space opened

Tiga welcomed the official opening of the ‘White Space’ learning and knowledge creation centre at Abertay University in Dundee,

together with the Scottish Executive’s provision of £56,800 to help sponsor the ‘Dare to be Digital’ competition during the summer.

The White Space facility, a £2.5 million development, is being used by computer arts and games students, PhD researchers,

lecturers and businesses. It provides a learning and creative environment that encourages knowledge sharing, team working and technological and business development.

Dare to be Digital involve teams of five students, working in regional centres for 10 weeks to develop a prototype video game.

Approximately 100 teams of five are expected to take part up and down the country. 20 of these teams will go through to the full competition, which runs from June 4th to August 9th.

Richard Wilson, CEO of Tiga, said: “Scotland has some great video game developers, including Realtime Worlds, Denki, Dynamo Games, Black, Outerlight, 4J Studios,

Black Company Studios, Tag games and Rockstar North. Abertay’s learning centre and the Dare to be Digital projects should help these and other games developers.

“The new White Space learning and knowledge creation centre will further strengthen Scotland’s competitive edge in video games. We hope that other UK universities will continue to develop knowledge sharing facilities and opportunities, particularly in those parts of the country where there are already clusters of games developers.

“The Dare to be Digital programme is a fantastic scheme, with a great reputation in the games industry. It encourages promotion

and learning about making video games, it gives students a chance to work with some first class game development businesses and and it gives developers an opportunity to work with graduates before hiring them. This is a scheme that deserves further expansion.”

End

Notes to editors:

1. Tiga is the national trade association that represents games developers in the UK and in Europe. We have 155 members,

the majority of whom are games developers, but we also have outsourcing companies and technology businesses as members

who provide services to games developers. Tiga’s vision is to make the UK the best place in the world to do games business.

2. Abertay University’s White Space facility became operational in 2007 but was officially opened this week. For further information, see: http://www.abertay.ac.uk/News/NewsDetails.cfm?NewsID=1374

3. For more information about Dare to be Digital, see: http://www.daretobedigital.com/

4. For further information, please contact: Dr Richard Wilson, Tiga CEO on: 0845 0941095; Mob: 07875 939643; or: Email:

richard.wilson@tiga.org.