Mikinna Kerns/Iowa State Daily

The painted steel sculpture, entitled Sequence, rises from the snow Jan. 8 outside the College of Design. The sculpture was erected in 1979 by John Douglas Jennings and has become a landmark for the College of Design.  

Iowa State University is exploring plans to add game design to the list of majors in the fall of 2024. 

Jeremy Best, associate professor in the department of history, said the game design idea came to be from student demand. 

“This has long been a response to stated student demand,” Best said. “Students who are enrolling in ISU, aiming to enroll in ISU, communicating to enrollment and recruitment officials that they want a game design major that they wish there was one so it’s always been something that students have been interested in.” 

The major and potential Degree of the Future will have three areas of focus students can choose from: art and interactive media design, game computing and game world narrative design and society. It will be spread across two colleges, design and liberal arts and sciences. 

Jeffrey Wheatley, assistant professor in the department of philosophy and religious studies, said students will pick an area of focus going into their second year of the major. 

“Students going into their second year they pick one of those focus areas, and they get that expertise, but they’re also going to be taking classes in the other focus areas, and they’ll have some wiggle room on which classes they want to take,” Wheatley said. “So for us, I think game design, part of it is about the technical skills of making a game and game mechanics and you need to know programming.” 

Alenka Poplin, associate professor in the department of community and regional planning, said faculty envisioned this as an interdisciplinary, interdepartmental and inter-college major, “Which means that requires, not only requires but inspires all of us by the contributions that many disciplines can make to game design. I think this is something that really excites me to see how many people are interested in contributing and how versatile this topic is, and how many areas it entails.” 

Poplin said there will be many interesting courses available for students in this major including game playing and game analysis.

“We would like to offer game design history, game design in cultures, we would like to offer programming for games and engines.”

Poplin said there would also be classes for writing for games and video games in politics, and more.

Best said game design has been a lifelong interest and hobby of his.

“When the call for people who want to participate went out, I was already thinking about these things and had connections in the gaming and game studies community, which is the folks who study this stuff, and I wanted to really commit myself to making sure this was the best program that we could have at Iowa State,” Best said.

Wheatley said there have been many attempts by faculty in the past to create this major and with one in the works, the faculty is ambitious about game design.

“A great game is a game that has a story,” Wheatley said. “It has a compelling world that the player is in and it has some sort of ethical awareness. So I think a great game is one that has at least some sort of soul to it. That’s one of the parts of this major that has me really excited.”

The major is in the works and has possible plans to be brought to Iowa State in the fall of 2024. 

The Degrees of the Future funding is a strategic plan inspired by President Wendy Wintersteen. Degrees of the Future received an initial investment of  $1.5 million and is a plan to create new programs at Iowa State to meet employers’ and student demand in a world of increasing technological advancement.