DGRC Brochure Wins American Graphic Design Award

NC State’s Digital Games Research Center's (DGRC) new brochure has received a 2008 American Graphic Design Award.  The American Design Awards (ADA) is among the top internationally recognized design organizations, and perhaps the most popular independent awards organization globally with more than 35,000 submissions annually.

The brochure was designed by Liaison Design Group of Raleigh in collaboration with Dr. R. Michael Young, associate professor of Computer Science and co-director of the DGRC at NC State.  It describes the research, teaching and extension efforts of the 16 DGRC faculty.

For more details, read the CSC News story here.

In the January issue of the London Review of Books, John Lancaster makes an interesting case about the status of computer and console games as art.  The article's starting paragraph is below.  For more details, read the full piece here.

Is it Art?

John Lanchester

From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist. The newspapers cover the movies extensively, and while it isn’t necessary to feel that they do all that great a job of it, there’s no denying that they have a try. Video games by contrast are consigned to the nerdy margins of the papers, and are pretty much invisible in broadcast media. Video-game fans return the favour: they constitute the demographic group least likely to pay attention to newspapers and are increasingly uninterested in the ‘MSM’, or mainstream media.

Read more.