News
School of Interactive Games and Media

Article written by Brian Tomaszewski, associate professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, and undergraduate game design and development students Carson Lampila, Noah Richards, Liam Andres, Chase Call, and Alex Sarnese.

Forbes has identified a few of the RIT alumni set to define the next decade—and beyond. Two RIT alumni—and a third just a few months shy of the age cut-off—were named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2022. Jackie Wiley ’16 (game design and development) was honored in the Games category, and Dylan Ayrey ’15 (computer engineering) was named in the Enterprise Technology category.

Rochester-area public school students will create social change using video games at the AT&T & RIT ROCtheChange Game Jam held Jan. 15—the first free youth game jam in the region.

NASA’s Artemis program plans to return humans to the moon by 2025. However, in a new game developed by RIT faculty and students, people can use virtual reality to return even sooner.

In 2001, the dot-com bubble was bursting and investors had lost confidence in internet companies. Twenty years later, data has become a new currency, and people can access just about anything from their smartphones. Throughout all these changes, Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences has evolved into the largest college at RIT, with more than 4,600 students this year. Since its creation 20 years ago, GCCIS has awarded more than 14,000 degrees—in a growing number of computing disciplines.

RIT ranked No. 6 on the 2021 Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) College Rankings from Animation Career Review. RIT also ranked No. 3 on the east coast and No. 5 among private schools.

W. Michelle Harris, an associate professor in RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media, has had her piece In Their Wake, an interactive digital memorial to the forgotten Black people who developed Rochester, selected for the 67th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition, the region’s longest-running juried exhibition. Harris is one of 28 members of the RIT community who had pieces selected for the exhibition.

RIT is considered one of the nation’s best universities for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review. The education-services company features RIT in the just-published 2022 edition of its book The Best 387 Colleges. RIT was also listed fourth in the Top 50 Game Design: Undergraduate category.

Designers from various College of Art and Design programs, as well as RIT developers, created projects that were recognized in the biennial MODE Fest.

Two video games affiliated with RIT won awards at the 2021 Game Developers Conference virtual event in July.

RIT faculty-researchers will develop a game-design training system that could help astronauts maintain balance, motor skills, and other cognitive functions while in space. NASA, in partnership with the National Space Grant Foundation, has selected six university teams, including RIT, to develop innovative design ideas that will help NASA advance and execute its Moon to Mars exploration objectives.

As part of a gameplay and prototyping class at RIT this spring, 25 game design and development students got to participate in a virtual cultural exchange with 30 students at a Japanese college. The teams learned about each other’s cultures and overcame language barriers and time zone differences to create projects for a global game jam.