In an attempt to bring high technology industry to one of the poorest areas of the country, Ohio University will open the Gaming Research & Immersive Design Laboratory, a state-of-the-art video game facility, in Athens, Ohio sometime in early 2006.
GRID Associate Director John Bowditch said he hopes by educating the university's students in the video game industry, game developers will relocate to the Athens area and in turn avoid the "brain drain" the region sometimes faces.
"A lot of people are very excited about it because it's bringing something innovative to a community which is somewhat poor," Bowditch said. "Athens County is among the poorest counties in Ohio — it's considered 'Appalachian Ohio.'"
OU Provost Kathy Krendl said the university's commitment to video game research has already begun to supersede the region's blight reputation.
"The Appalachian counties in the state of Ohio are not only the poorest counties in the state, they're among the poorest counties in the entire country," Krendl said, although she noted the area's low cost of living and its "beautiful country" are two factors which make Athens desirable to game developers.
"Several of them have been looking at the region and a couple of them have been relocating here," she said.
Although some skeptics frown upon OU, a public institution, devoting resources to video game research and an arcade which will be open to the general public, both Krendl and Bowditch said video game research is a legitimate field of study on a number of different levels.
"It's a legitimate field of study because the video game industry is growing faster than the motion picture industry," Bowditch said. "There's a lot of student interest in learning how to develop video games and animation."
Bowditch noted "lots of programs around the country" are studying the video game industry, and said the University of Southern California, involved in a partnership with Electronic Arts (EA), is most notable.
"All new medium [sic] are not accepted in academia," Christopher Swain, co-director of the EA Game Innovation Lab at USC, said. "The first film school in the world was at USC [and] people said this wasn't worthy of academia, games are just in the same position."
Swain equated video games today to a nickelodeon for film in the year 1910. Just as people then did not comprehend the prominence film would take, Swain said people today have not yet given video games due respect as a medium.
"I would say that games would be like the literature of the 21st century in the way that film was the literature of the 20th century," Swain said.
Swain said at the EA lab everything they do is for research purposes, and said their first mission is to "build critical thinkers" about what he called the "interactive media."
At OU, Krendl said in addition to teaching students the science behind building and designing video games, GRID will also allow research to be done across a number of different fields of study, including socio-economic, political, cultural and gender-related studies.
"There are all kinds of research questions that relate to the individual's reaction to a serious game or a traditional video game," Krendl said.
Current estimates for the cost of the GRID lab are approximately $500,000, according to Bowditch, who said the $2.5 million figure reported by an Ohio newspaper Friday was incorrect.
