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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Games for Impact R&D: The GLS Center
Speaker(s): Brian Pelletier, Kurt Squire
Company Name(s): Learning Games Network, University of Wisconson-Madison
Track / Format: GDC Education Summit

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Overview: Games for impact are often derided as bad games that are built on questionable ideas. In the Fall of 2012, the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center launched an innovative, integrated R&D lab at UW-Madison to buck that trend. Housing a complete game development studio (40+ staff) and research team (15+ scholars), this center attempts the purportedly impossible: to create a fully blended model that includes an academic center, a non-profit foundation, and for-profit companies. This postmortem details how we took over an on-campus warehouse to create a skunkworks game lab, which leverages the cheap labor that academic institutions offer, while not confining ourselves to the grant-funded, university-owned space.

GDC 2013

Brian Pelletier

Learning Games Network

Kurt Squire

University of Wisconson-Madison

free content

GDC Education Summit

Game Career / Education