Several years ago, a national magazine ran a cartoon captioned, "A Parent's Fantasy." The drawing depicted several newspaper classified ads, all offering employment at top wages for video game players. The implication, though humorous, was that parents who thought their child's video game-playing skills might lead to any kind of a career were dreaming.

How times have changed.

In February 1998, DigiPen Institute of Technology opened in Redmond, Wash. The school offers the first ever baccalaureate degree of science in Real Time Interactive Simulation, which is an academic way of saying that students can now major in video game programming.

The degree is an intensive four-year program, which focuses on video game programming and computer animation with emphasis on real-time interactive simulations. Students learn the skills needed for the rapidly growing, high-tech video game and special effects industries. And possessing those skills can bring in a healthy paycheck.

There were 40 students in the initial class, but DigiPen now accepts 100 students per year for the Bachelor of Science program and will accept the same number for its inaugural Bachelor of Arts program class in 2003. Not bad for a school whose first students learned about it reading Nintendo Power Magazine.

The success of the Vancouver program (without advertising, the school received 12,000 applications for 80 openings) led Comair to expand the curriculum to offer the bachelor's degree.

Students aren't automatically offered positions with Nintendo, nor are they required to work for the corporation when they graduate. But finding a job seems to be no problem (a third of one class at the Vancouver school was lured away by other game manufacturers before graduation).

"It is of utmost importance that our students love what they do, and the technical skills that we teach will enable them to get good jobs in the private sector," says Comair. "The demand for trained talent in these fields is so great that our students weigh offers from the major players here in the Northwest and Hollywood in the video game design and computer animation fields well before they complete the curriculum."

Video games have become a $15 billion industry worldwide, and that's just on consoles alone. Add in games played on home computers, the Internet, and in arcades, and the figures grow even more. Nearly half of all homes in the U.S. have at least one video game console. So, it's a sure bet that the market will continue to grow for the games and for the people who can design and produce increasingly sophisticated hardware and software.

The students come from a variety of backgrounds and educational levels. Some are right out of high school, while others range up to age 30 and have college degrees. What they share is imagination, creativity, and a real love of playing video games.

Comair estimates that students spend "90 percent of their time learning general mathematics and computer graphics mathematics, which is more toward matrices, matrix algebra, vector geometry, and so forth. Math is at the core of programming and understanding computers."

Physics is also a vital field for the future programmers. "Most of the time, games are an interactive simulation of the real world," says Comair. "The real world is governed by the laws of physics–gravity, motion dynamics, wave optics and so on. And these have to be understood by the person who is trying to create that simulation."

For example, one group of DigiPen students designed a game that called for the hero to swing from place to place using his whip as a rope. The physics involved in rope swinging–tension, flexibility, motion–had to be studied for the movement of the character to look right.

Armed with the education and the imagination, graduates of DigiPen will be designing the games of the future. Right now, the market for those games is dominated by 6- to 14-year-old males (60 percent of game buyers fall in this demographic), but some game-company officials think a female market is growing. With the popularity of "Xena, Warrior Princess" on television, is a "Xena" video game, played by hoards of little (and probably some big) girls, far behind?

When asked the most basic question–"Why do you like to play video games?"–all the boys responded the same way: "Because it's fun."

"The Serious Study of Video Games." USA Today. 5 July 1995.

"Video Games 101." The Business Enthusiast. Alaska Airlines Magazine. June 1997.