Carleton Game Day featured a range of guest speakers and competitions geared towards video game design (Photo: Lasia Kretzel)

Students took part in a weekend full of video-game-related activities in the fourth annual Carleton Game Day, put on by the university’s School of Information Technology.

The events began Fri., Jan. 29 and featured the Ottawa chapter of a global game design competition, as well as guest speakers from the video game industry.

Ali Arya, an associate professor at Carleton who helped organized the event, said the weekend aimed to showcase video games as more than mindless entertainment devices.

“We are trying to promote the culture of video games as not just casual entertainment, but as a serious area,” Arya said. “We want people to look at them in a more professional way.”

The second annual Game Jam, a global video game design competition that took place over the course of the weekend, gave teams of students from around the world the opportunity to bring a video game to life in less than 48 hours. 

Amanda Emmanuel, a fourth-year interactive multimedia and design student, took part in the competition and said she had a great experience.

“I was a little intimidated at first, because I don’t really play games and I thought ‘oh what do I know?’” she said. “It was a lot of work, but in the end, it was awesome seeing the fruits of your labour, and in a working state.”

The end result of Emmanuel’s team’s work was Glitch, a puzzle game where a computer glitch releases a prisoner from his cell and the player must work their way through a jail where nothing is as it seems.

Emmanuel said she enjoyed the global nature of the event.

“I am an avid Twitterer, and I was tweeting about it and this guy from the Munich chapter asked ‘How’s it going over there?’” she said.

Representatives from numerous leaders in the video game industry, including Microsoft, Akendi, and Ubisoft, spoke about topics ranging from game design, to touch-screen technology, and human-computer interaction.

Arya said Anthony Whitehead, director of the information technology school, created the original concept of bringing in the lecturers.

“We have faculty here with ties to the game design industry and we thought it would be of interest to both our students and other Carleton students,” Arya said.

Emmanuel said she believed students enjoyed the chance to interact with industry leaders in both the lectures and when they offered their critiques on the games the students designed. 

“It was cool to get that one-on-one conversation with a person from the industry to kind of validate what you’re doing,” she said. 

Emmanuel also said the event fostered a sense of community amongst the Carleton students in the bachelor of information technology program.

“A lot of teams didn’t even know each other beforehand,” she said. “But the enthusiasm of the people who came and just plunged themselves into something and just go at it was kind of cool.”