Games, Film, and Digital Media

One brick at a time — that’s how members of RIT’s Electronic Gaming Society are building a digital version of the RIT campus in the video game Minecraft. As universities across the country closed their campuses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many students went to Minecraft as a way to stay connected with their schools. The game allows multiple players to collaborate on building structures and designing landscapes, including recreating physical places.

Situations such as the coronavirus pandemic have heightened interest in the importance of disaster management and mitigation. At RIT, researchers have created two new serious games that could be used as important learning tools for solving these world problems.

Elan Lee ’98 (computer science) decided one day that he no longer wanted to do what he was doing for a living. He quit his job at Microsoft and embarked on a one-year break to figure out what was next. But a few weeks later, he spent a weekend with friends building a card game around the idea of Russian Roulette. Before they knew it, they had created the wildly popular Exploding Kittens.

Creative Industry Day drew an impressive array of talent seekers from the likes of The Walt Disney Co., Forbes Media and Procter & Gamble anxiously looking to meet with RIT students in a career-fair setting inside Gordon Field House yesterday.