When people in academia hear the word gaming, they usually don't associate it with any serious career choice. For the multibillion-dollar electronic-game industry, that's a problem. How do wannabes attain the education—in 3-D modeling, scripting, storytelling, and so on—to make themselves valuable to game companies?

"People today just don't realize the pervasiveness of games and don't think of them as an art form," says Jason Della Rocca, program director for the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).

At the Game Developers Conference in March, these matters were addressed at the first IGDA Academic Summit. Participants included representatives from schools offering degrees in game design (such as Carnegie Mellon and MIT). Most agreed that games are similar to movies of the seventies—they are worthy of study.

Alan Yu, director of the conference, said, "These are our seventies—right now."