Students who created video games as part of their final projects for a computer graphics class may sell their games to Microsoft.
John Harger, Jeremy Wright, Craig Vineyard, and Justin Kellogg all spent about six weeks creating Xbox games for professor Pradeep Sen's 400-level class. The students are now in the final stages of working through copyright issues with STC.UNM, a nonprofit corporation that protects and transfers inventions created at UNM.
Sen said he wanted to offer a final project to his students that had uses outside the classroom.
"Typically, a final project in a class is something that you do and maybe the teacher looks at it but that's about it," he said. "The thing that I really wanted to do is have the games and give them a life beyond UNM."
Recently, Microsoft launched Community Games, which allows individuals to upload video games for the Xbox and potentially reach more than 10 million gamers worldwide. Sen said this afforded his students a unique opportunity to propagate their work.
"A lot of these games were reasonably compelling, and these students put a lot of work into it, so I was looking for a way to distribute these games to the outside world," he said.
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Harger created "Toybox Racing," a racing game set in a child's playroom.
Harger said he's pleased with the opportunity the class provided.
"I've always been interested in computer graphics, so it was kind of a natural fit for me," he said. "I think it's a good opportunity, because not only can I make a few bucks off of it, but it helps out the school and the department, that sort of thing."
Sen said UNM gets a share of the potential revenue because the games were created using UNM equipment and that other legal issues are being handled by STC.UNM.
"The idea of taking the final project and posting it on a Web site where people could download and, perhaps, even pay for it, is really legally kind of weird," he said.
Sen said he approached STC.UNM and told them students had created computer games that might be marketable.
Lisa Kuuttila, president and CEO of STC.UNM, said the department has been working on protecting the copyright on all of the games for about a year.
"Professor Sen and the students in his class have developed a number of innovative games, and we have been working with them for some time to help protect them and also to evaluate the commercial potential, and how we would best get the games distributed into the marketplace," she said.
Kuuttila said there are two ways to market the games: through Xbox's Community Games, and through a Web site called FolioDirect.net, which markets university inventions in a way similar to Amazon.com.
"It's really kind of a new area for STC to be involved in, so we're really excited," she said. "One of the strengths I think STC has as a technology-transfer organization is the ability to use technology itself. We do that in a lot of our marketing and other efforts now, so we think that we're well-positioned to help these students with these kind of projects."
Sen said the video game development model will make the industry more democratic.
"I think this is going to empower a small group of people to make a big difference in gaming," he said. "When you had the game-development market dominated by a few big players, all of the games became very conservative, because when they put $30 million into a game, they have to get $30 million out of it. They had to stick with what worked."
