Digital Gaming: Innovative Pathways for Building Skills, Careers and Community Among Young New Yorkers

Episode Transcript

Vincent Boudreau00:14

Welcome to From City to the World. I'm your host. Vince Boudreau, the President of The City College of New York. From City to the World is a show about how the work that we're doing at City College matters to people across the city and throughout the world. So on the show, we'll discuss the practical application of our research in solving real-world issues like poverty and homelessness, mental health challenges, affordable housing disparities in healthcare. Today we are going to discuss gaming and the relationship between gaming and the development of a gaming industry in New York City and New York's economic development prospects. So here's a question. Are you annoyed at how your kids or your grandkids or your friends, how much time they spend gaming, does that feel like they are wasting their time on a pointless endeavor? Well, how would you feel if I told you that they could be honing their skills for a job or an actually exciting career?

So our guests today are teaching young people in underserved communities how to code so that they can pursue academic and career opportunities in the digital gaming industry. And I've got to say, coding just scratches the surface, the kinds of skills you need to pursue a gaming career reach across a range of disciplines, and we'll be talking about that. So our first guest is Dr. Stan Altman. He's a professor here at City College and he's the co-founder of the Harlem Gallery of Science whose mission is to increase the number of Black and Latinx youth that enter the STEM fields. STEM of course, stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I think it's probably more accurate in the context of today's conversation to talk about STEAM, where you put an extra A in there for the arts, and we'll talk about where the arts come in as well.

The STEM program also mentors students and exposes them to culturally relevant themes such as sports, music and digital games. That's part of the A I was just talking about. Dr. Altman was instrumental also in creating the Gaming Pathways Program here at City College, and he successfully negotiated $2 million in funding for the program from the New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. Now, more recently, he co-produced the exhibition video games, the Great Connector, and that explored the ways that today's youth use video games to develop personal and professional skills and build communities through social networks. That took place just down the Hill. And I went down to see it. It was a truly remarkable exhibition, and it's going to have an afterlife that I think we will learn about little by little over the next couple of weeks.

Dr. Altman is a graduate of City College of New York. He had a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He also earned a master of science in electrical engineering from Purdue University and a doctorate in systems science from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, which is now the NYU Tandon School. In 2016, Dr. Altman was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal for Outstanding service in the field by The City College of New York's Alumni Association. He's actually one of, I think now three sibling pairs to have won the Townsend Harris Medal. So that's another distinction that he has. And he was for a significant period of time, the interim president at Baruch College. Dr. Altman, welcome to From City to the World.

Stan Altman03:54

Thank you, Vince. Always a pleasure to sit and talk to you.

Vincent Boudreau03:58

So ever since I became president, we've engaged in a series of conversations that have a common denominator, which is how can we undertake programming that will reach out to young people in communities like Harlem and Washington Heights and the South Bronx and involve them in STEM and STEAM education, and then move from that educational experience into careers. So I'd like you to talk about these different initiatives that you've been involved in, starting with the Harlem Gallery of science and running through to the Gaming Pathways. And of course, in between there have been exhibitions like Dunk, the basketball exhibition you did, the video exhibition that we talked about. But maybe start by telling us how all of these things cohere in your sense of mission.

Stan Altman04:49

Well, I guess it starts having grown up on the streets of the South Bronx. So I had a clear sense of what the value for me was having ultimately an option to come up to City College. I mean, growing up, I never thought about going to college, but at some point, fortunately for me, I did. And coming back to the city university at Baruch, working with a lot of the young people, I found that starting after my presidency, I began to focus on the issue of how to get young people prepared for the change in job and skill requirements for the 21st century. And I did a series of programs, one around culture in terms of a program with Baruch. Ultimately it became CUNY Arts with the Cuban Museum, and then did a big program with IBM introducing AI as a way of getting students to work on projects, solving real-life, city-wide problems.

And I kept noticing as some other colleagues of mine that Black and Latinx students were just not engaged. And at some point about 2013, another colleague and I decided we needed to try a very different approach. And we actually came up to City College, having been approached by an organization in Europe called the Science Gallery International, about actually doing a program in which City College would become the US hub, which is now a worldwide network. And not surprisingly, after a year of conversations, the state budget took a big hit. City College had probably one of the biggest parts of that hit that got put on a back burner. My colleague and I at that point, having spent a year really thinking about engaging young people in ways that were exciting, that spoke in their language, we decided to just do this anyway. I called up to then president and said, "We're going to do this. We're not going to ask City College for money. We're going to form a non-profit."

And so we formed a non-profit called Science and Arts Engagement, New York, and we work, doing business as the Harlem Gallery of Science because we wanted to make a statement to the Harlem community that this was their enterprise. This was not something we were coming from CUNY to do. This is something we were doing because we believed in the investment in Harlem up through Upper Manhattan into the South Bronx. And the first thing we did was figuring out what was the first exhibition because we thought if we could find themes that engaged young people, that things that they could identify with, and if we could then show them that the things they do every day embody all of the issues of STEM that might get them interested in getting more excited and address one of the questions, which is, how does this relate to me, 'cause that's often the question that gets asked.

And so we dunked, and it was an exhibition that talked about does size matter. We ran it for four weeks under some strange conditions. The night before we opened, the heating system in the pop-up space, we were going to use broke. And the people who lent us the space were not interested in fixing it. So in the middle of the winter, we were running this exhibition, but it did not change the student's enthusiasm. And we then, about a year later, did another exhibition called The Science of Music from Jazz to Hip-Hop in which we basically showed, I think we did two things there. One, we wanted to engage the community and the elder members of the community to say, look at the kinds of things City College can provide to your community and the kids in the community. And we did a concert here on the City College campus, which had a full house. In fact, I remember that Dee Dee Mozeleski, your Vice President, couldn't even come in because of the fire code.

And so then Covid happened, we were going to junk again, and then we began to think about what the folks who we were engaged with on our board were telling us about gaming. And so in 2001, we got a small grant from the West Harlem Community Development Corporation, and we decided to ask high school students in the community why they played video games. And I was shocked they weren't playing video games because they had nothing better to do. They were playing video games because they were using it to develop personal and professional skills. And one story I always tell is there's this young woman we interviewed in the Bronx. These were high school students, and we said, "Why do you play video games? What is it that you want to do as a career?" And she said, "I want to be a physician assistant in emergency room."

So what's that got to do with playing a video game? She says, "Because I have to develop the kinds of skills where I have to work as a member of a team, I have to be able to communicate, I have to think quickly on my feet. And if we don't do that, we lose." She says, "You know what happens in the emergency room if we don't do that? We lose the patient."

Vincent Boudreau10:24

What a prescient thing for a young student to say about why she's doing what she's doing.

Stan Altman10:31

And I think that's the thing that's often overlooked. We often don't ask young people, "What is it that you're actually thinking? What is it actually that you need?" And so what came out of that was this whole view that if we use the gaming as a platform for engaging young people, maybe what would come out of it, because the skills you need go everywhere from the arts. As somebody once said, "You can't play any of these games if you don't have a story." So if you can't write and you don't know English, you don't go anywhere. So that was the genesis. So we had this idea, we were introduced to an organization called Urban Arts, which works in high schools using game design as a way of teaching STEM skills and preparing young people for college. We decided that this seemed like a good idea if we partnered.

They were looking for a way for their young kids to be able to go to college in an affordable degree program. Most of them come from underserved communities. And so we approached the city and it was amazing. It took over the course of a five-month period. They were looking for a CUNY school to have a public program. They have been unsuccessful. And so when they heard that City College was prepared to do this, it took a while to negotiate a number that we could all be comfortable with. And so I think it was New Year's Eve at 2021 that we got a letter saying two million dollars.

Vincent Boudreau12:10

That's wonderful. That's wonderful. A moment ago when you were talking about the young woman who wanted to be a physician's assistant, it was very cognizant of this broad range of skills that gaming helped her develop. I think a lot of times when we think about how you develop a gaming program, our imagination goes to coding and computer science and all of that, but that's only the beginning of the story. And I wonder if you could talk about the different disciplinary directions that people come from when they engage in building a gaming industry, a game even.

Stan Altman12:50

Well, I think the thing that is often overlooked is that the work wheel of the 20th century and the 21st century are radically different. When I went to work, most of what I did was individual stuff. Periodically you worked with other people, but you had assignments. In today's world, it's all about teamwork. And the problems you deal with are much, much more complicated. Everything from technology to human behavior to societal dynamics that you need people with different skills. And so the idea in the first instance is that when you want to build almost any project, you bring together a multidisciplinary team of people who bring different skills. And not everybody is going to be assumed to have all the skills. You may have a coder, you may have somebody who's a good project manager, you may have somebody who has a real artistic bent because you need to think how do you communicate in a world that's not much more image-driven and word-driven these days, you need somebody who can tell a story otherwise you don't have a game because there's no thing to play.

So I think what you find is that the skills that are brought together are much broader and therefore the applicability to different industries people are beginning to realize are all also much broader than just the digital gaming industry because everybody is now beginning to adapt some of the different kinds of skills, whether it's animation or whether it's artistic or graphic rendering or software engineering-

Vincent Boudreau14:27

Storytelling.

Stan Altman14:28

Storytelling everywhere.

Vincent Boudreau14:31

So I wanted to just make sure that you all heard this. Obviously we want people to know about the program, but we especially want young people or the parents of young people who are hearing this to understand that this is an industry. And we'll hear a little bit later about where this sits in relationship to New York City's economic development plans, but it's an industry that brings people from a whole different range of aptitudes and talents and aspirations. And so think really carefully about where you or your brother, sister, child may fit into this program.

And I say that also because the scope of this program, and I mean the scope of when you begin to engage people and where they eventually go, it ranges from kids that are still in the public school system as early as I mean early college, maybe even early high school, and even earlier than that, all the way up through the granting of a baccalaureate degree and then into their careers. Can you talk a little bit about the strategy that you've developed to recruit? And I mean, I know it starts often with competition and then it gets into classwork eventually, but can you flesh that out for us a little bit?

Stan Altman15:45

Yeah. I think once we created the Gaming Pathways Program, and once we began to develop both courses and activities here at the college, I think one of the things we were very mindful of was that there were other things going on around the city, one of which was the Department of Education running something called the Battle of the Burrows is all the schools had access to Minecraft education, which is a tool for building games or animated videos you can do. And the idea was that you gave young people a challenge. You might say, "Could you build me a sustainable park?" And the competition ranged from kids in the third to fifth grade. There was one third to fifth grade division in the elementary schools. There was a middle school competition, and then there was a high school competition.

And when they ran it last year, there were over 3000 schools competing. And some of the suggestions that they came up with were incredible. And I sat in on the elementary school competition a year ago, and the winning team had as part of its Sustainable Park, a building with no windows. And one of the judges said to the captain, what is that building? And they said it's a sanctuary. A sanctuary. They go, "Yeah", and this was a week after the bad air from Canada. They said, "It's a hermetically sealed building. It's pure oxygen inside the building. So if we have bad air, you can come in here and stay until the air clears." And this was a fifth grader explaining the ecological dynamics of what they were building and preparing for.

So I think there's that effort going on. I think what we have seen is that young people automatically gravitate to playing games. It doesn't matter what the age is. And so it's something that engages them. It requires that they have to think. It requires that they solve complex problems. I have to say, some of the games that they play, I could sit for 10 minutes to try to figure out how I get started. They don't blink. In fact, we were at one event that we were running and must've been a four-year-old showed up, started playing, and then the eight-year-old brother showed up who pushed the four-year-old away, and then this older sister showed up, and then she started playing the game. So I think one of the things that we are seeing is that gaming is a way of engaging people, both their curiosity and their excitement about having to accomplish something.

And one of the things that I've often said is that we too often in our education system talk about failure. Kids who play these games don't think about failure. They think about learning from an experience which didn't work out to do better the second time. So it's not about I failed and therefore I'm a terrible whatever. It's about, okay, so I have to learn how to beat this game.

Vincent Boudreau19:14

I never thought about that. I mean, every game until you beat the game ultimately ends in some kind of failure. And kids are playing games until four o'clock in the morning because it's almost reflexive. You fail, you start again, you fail, you start again. And every other commencement speech talks about picking yourself up and dusting yourself off and going off after. That's a really interesting point.

Stan Altman19:39

And that's the innovation cycle.

Vincent Boudreau19:41

Yeah, absolutely is. I spoke earlier about the video game exhibition that you just did, and it was truly extraordinary. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you felt were the highlights of that exhibition and also how people engaged with it when they came in.

Stan Altman20:04

Well, I think one of the reasons we chose to do that, and that was where the Harlem Gallery of Science comes in because it has the flexibility to be able to do these things, assuming we can raise the money to do them. One of the things, as you said earlier, I think we kept hearing how parents really didn't understand that there was more to video games than just their kids sitting in front of a tube, but that there were real careers here. In fact, a typical video game designer upon graduation may make, I guess the low end of the salary scales about $70,000. After a few years experience, if you're at the medium salary, you're at $105,000. And if you're really good, you're talking about a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

And so there are real job opportunities here. And more importantly, I think you develop a range of skills that are then transportable across almost all industries. Everybody is talking about the ability to communicate, solving problems, the ability to work as a member of a team. So I think part of what we wanted to do in this exhibition is address parents to give them a sense of really what was the gaming world for their kids, and that there were real futures possibilities here. We also wanted to address for teachers, because it's really uneven about teachers in the public school system who have any sense of how gaming fits into the worlds of their kids' lives. Some of them have got it. And so they've weaved and woven into their curriculums, gaming of some sort. Some know that their kids play games, don't really understand it. Some just think it's a waste of their kids' time.

So we wanted to address the whole issue for teachers by actually having games that were designed for learning particular skills and that have won awards to say that there are bodies that then look at these games and say, "This is a good experience." And then for a lot of kids, the gaming pathways worked in about seven or eight different high schools. We really wanted to give young people up here the opportunity to see in a much broader sense the world of gaming that they're in. Very often when you're in it, you really don't appreciate everything that's involved. And we were shocked. We ran it for eight weeks. We had over 3,500 visitors. We had set aside special time for class. We had over 2,800 of those visitors were from the school system. 75% of the schools that came had students of color that were 80% or more in the schools.

So it was a wide impact on the exhibition. We were then asked to do the exhibition for a day or two, and actually this exhibition took a lot more prep time to set up. And so we've created a kind of pop-up version that we could set up in 15 minutes that does some of the same things. And we've done it at the Brooklyn Public Library. When we were asked to do this at the Battle of the Borough, we did it in the New York Public Library, and we're going to do it hopefully in the school systems to get young kids and teachers to see what the gaming world really offers them, so.

Vincent Boudreau23:32

Yeah, I'll admit, I'm not a gamer, but I did at a certain stage in my life. This goes back to when people were playing Space Invaders at the Pizza Parlor, which is to say, I drifted away from playing games at a time when all the games were one person looking at a screen and tuning out the rest of the world. You have in your description of why this is important, what people get out of it, you've repeatedly referenced things like engagement and teamwork that pulls individual players out of a isolation. It seems like it's not a monogamous relationship between a player and a screen. And what's changed in the world of gaming to open it up to be a more kind of social enterprise, and how is that important in the work that you're doing?

Stan Altman24:30

Well, I think one of the things that we've heard actually from one of the students here when we first started working up here, who a fellow named Matthew Lopez, who was the president of the e-Sports Club here, he said that he was a very introverted kid. He didn't have a lot of friends. Covid happened. He had no social networks. And so he suddenly built himself a computer and started getting involved in games, built up social networks, suddenly found that there was a lot of things they shared in common and has built up this whole world that's now out there that we're probably completely unaware of, where young people build all these different networks for sharing information, for sharing ideas, for working on joint projects, for coming up with things that get them excited.

And so I think part of it is we are really much more of a communal people than I think people have accepted up for a long while. Covid maybe took us to an extreme of what it meant to be isolated. I think one of the most interesting things about the exhibition is one of the games was a community game where eight different people could play it. You had to play it together if you played. And so we found people who had no idea, they didn't know each other, would gravitate to that game. 75% of the visitors played that game. And one of the most common comments afterwards on the feedback was, can't we have more community-based games?

Vincent Boudreau26:09

Yeah, yeah. So I guess one of the technological innovations is when games go from being, when they start to use the internet and they start to bring in remote players, that pulls you out of isolation. You can't do that. And I guess more recently, it's almost possible to look at games and social media as having merged. They're becoming communication platforms and recreation platforms at the same time.

It's a great pleasure to introduce our second guest, and this is Ms. Alia Jones-Harvey, and she's the Associate Commissioner of Development and Educational Initiatives at the New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. By successfully building partnerships with employers, unions, nonprofit organizations, schools, and city agencies, Ms. Jones-Harvey has launched educational and training programs that have served over 25,000 New Yorkers across film, TV, music, theater, publishing, and advertising. She also leads the campaign in digital games to develop an equity-centered talent pipeline, engage employers, establish strategic partnerships, and grow that industry in New York.

Now, in addition to her role with the City of New York, she is an Oliver, Award-winning, and five-time Tony Award-nominated theater producer, having successfully mounted or co-produced nine plays, seven musicals for Broadway and London's West End. She also teaches a course entitled Producing for Broadway at the City College School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Let me just let that sit there as a little bit of an advertisement if you want to learn about producing for Broadway. We have that here at CCNY. Aliyah, welcome to From City to the World. We're really pleased to have you here.

Alia Jones-Harvey27:57

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Vincent Boudreau27:59

So we've been talking with Stan about his development of the program and how it pulls students from schools and what he's doing to help shape them. I want to now talk about the other end of the conversation and start with this thousand-foot view of the workforce picture in New York City. And where does gaming fit into your vision or the administration's vision of economic development in New York City?

Alia Jones-Harvey28:25

Well, that's a big question. I think one of the interesting things to look at when we talk about gaming in New York City is that the city has now become the second-largest hub for tech jobs in the country. And we're excited to have said that we set a goal of becoming number two in tech, and we've reached it through investments like this, like investing in the City College Gaming Pathways Program. And so we see gaming being the next frontier for creative sciences in New York City. And so we're making a major investment in gaming from that perspective. Right now, what we know is that the game industry is about a $2.6 billion economic impact on the city, but our goal is, of course, to make it a much larger hub for gaming than it is now.

Vincent Boudreau29:37

And you said we're number two. Who's number one?

Alia Jones-Harvey29:40

In tech?

Vincent Boudreau29:41

Yeah,

Alia Jones-Harvey29:42

That's a good question. I would think that number one is in California, probably Silicon Valley, somewhere in the Bay Area.

Vincent Boudreau29:51

All right. So you hear that in New York, we've now identified the competition. I mean, using gaming as an example, can you talk a little bit about the various kind of strategy. If you want to build a new economic engine in New York City, what are the tools that you have at your disposal?

Alia Jones-Harvey30:12

So we're making investments in the talent pipeline, and we see City College as an integral part of preparing the next developers from New York City. And so that's a major part of how we make investments. But we're also investing in incubating talent. So developers that have finished school and are now focused on getting their games published and to the public, we're also investing, of course in all of these other contributors to games. What I think is most exciting about New York City being a hub for game development is that we're already a leader in the creative industries in New York City.

And so when you think about the development of a game, you're talking about music, you're talking about an artist that may be involved in the animation, or may be involved in modeling characters, and you're talking about a storyline. So from that perspective, the writing of the story that goes into the game, all of that is infused into how you create a game. And then there's the coding and on the back end, there's the marketing, there's the finance, there's all of these other elements. So when you talk about game design, you're really talking broadly across many industries and disciplines in New York City, and we think we're leaders in so many of them already that it makes it a natural fit for developers to be here.

Stan Altman32:04

Can I put in a plug for City College?

Vincent Boudreau32:06

Sure. Plug away, Stan.

Stan Altman32:07

I mean, one of the reasons for having it at City College, it's exactly what Alia just said. All of those things are up here.

Vincent Boudreau32:13

Yeah, I never want to stand in the way of a plug for City College. So happy to have that. We spend so much time, I think rightfully so, talking about games in terms of recreation and in artistic expression, but as these games develop, the applications are broader than that. And can you talk a little bit about, as you think about economic development in the city outside of the recreational envelope, where else does the gaming footprint sit?

Alia Jones-Harvey32:45

The concept or gamification is being used across all kinds of industries, including healthcare, fitness. My watch is basically a game that's telling me if I win every day because I've closed my circles. And if you think about the fact that games are being used in so many different aspects of society now, and then there's the recreational game. I think that we have conceptualized games as something that children play. But in actuality, mobile games are very much an adult activity that might be happening on the train coming from work, going to work, or leisure at home. There are games now that are being used as therapy. There are games now that are being used for simulation and helping in aviation and engineering. And so when we think about games, it's really a broad spectrum of design and factors into a lot of different industries.

Vincent Boudreau34:04

So this is just a kind of illustrative question. The gamification of healthcare looks like what?

Alia Jones-Harvey34:12

Looks like helping doctors who are training to do surgery, be able to follow a simulation before they're actually physically engaging in incisions and using the kind of modeling that would help with understanding things like how our cells are forming or being deconstructed. So the technology being used in trying to solve some of the problems that exist in healthcare and some of the disease that we're trying to solve for. But the technology's being used in a lot of different ways. I'm just coming right now from a film studio that has gone virtual and basically everyone that operates the studio is playing a game. They've built a world just like you would build a world in making a game.

And that intersection that we're seeing now across all of our industries is happening rapidly. And so we're really challenged and happy to have this kind of partnership where we can ensure that New Yorkers are ready for what's coming next. And you know everything that people are talking about, by the time artificial intelligence has created the next generation of all of what we're playing now, we'll need to have game developers of the future ready to interact with what's coming next.

Vincent Boudreau36:13

I mean, I guess anything. I mean, Covid pushed so many things into remote access to people, to services, to scenarios, and I think anything, as you think about it, anything that you want to do that's not a face-to-face interaction with a person that where technology creates a space on your screen that mimics a space that you inhabit as a physical person is apprehensible through the lenses of the gaming industry. That's fascinating to me. Well, I have a workforce development question for you. I mean, earlier you talked about all the different ways in which what we're already good at in New York feed into gaming.

As somebody who is building the workforce, one of the things you think about, I believe, is where are workforce currently doesn't meet the needs of current economic development? Where do we need to develop talent? So where are our most prominent gaps and how are we, I mean, if I'm a young person thinking about what my major is going to be or if I'm a college thinking about where we need to put our educational resources, where do we do that in relationship to gaming?

Alia Jones-Harvey37:32

Well, that's an interesting question. Right now, where we see a lot of development happening is in independent games. So we call them indie games. So it's a group of developers that come together and decide they're going to build a game, and they may be doing it part-time on their own time, and they're not necessarily funded, but where the city is working to get to is major studios developing games. But when I think about outages that the city currently has, the newer platforms, so Unreal is one of them. And I just mentioned film production. So an engine that was developed by Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, which is one of the biggest games in the world, they've created an engine called Unreal. And that engine is used as the platform for many games that are developed, but it's also used as the platform for building worlds. So famously, I think that the movie that was most famous to be done all inside of a platform like this was the Mandalorian, which was totally built on a computer. So that movie was created on a computer,

Vincent Boudreau39:10

Had real actors in it, right, but?

Alia Jones-Harvey39:14

But rendered, so very much like a game. So their games, New York City, we are home to Take-Two Interactive, which is one of the largest publishers in the world. And they make games that use motion capture in a big way. They are employing thousands of actors so that the game that you're playing at home and you're watching, you're playing this game and their character's moving through your game, at some point, there were humans that had motion capture suits attached to them. And so that the movement that you see is real, even though it looks like an animated character, all of that's been layered on top of what was filming of a real person.

So imagine that that's happening, but at the same time, finding people with the skill to interact with that world and to use the unreal software, that platform. And you see that it crosses several industries that I've just mentioned, but Epic is working for it to be everywhere. So this platform allows for us to simulate real life in a lot of ways. And games now have become so close to reality. It's hard to tell if you're looking at a movie or a game, it's hard to tell if you're looking at something that's animated or something that's real when you look at a game these days.

Vincent Boudreau40:55

You talking about motion capture, one of the last stage roles I had was when I was in college, I did some drama. I played the dead body in the Real Inspector Howell. So my job, before the audience even came into the theater, I was a dead body on the floor, and I stayed there until the end of the play. So I don't know that that is a credential that I would want to use.

Alia Jones-Harvey41:21

What was the preparation?

Vincent Boudreau41:25

The only thing I asked them to do is that when the inspector comes in to turn me over so that the part of me that had fallen asleep on the floor would wake up in second half of the play. Let me just ask you the big question, I think, which is, if I'm a young person or if I'm advising a young person for participation in this industry, I want to Alia, I'll hear from you first, and then Stan from you, what should I be doing to prepare myself for this exciting new world of games?

Alia Jones-Harvey41:55

Well, I think recognizing that there are lots of ways, if you love games, if games are a passion for you, there are lots of ways to engage with the industry. Coding is one, but there are lots of ways, which I've mentioned a few of them. It's really a team effort that gets a game to being published and available. And so plugging in to games offers all kinds of opportunity, whether you're interested in writing the story line, marketing games, doing the legal aspect of protecting intellectual property or anything along those lines, there are, there's a lot of opportunity in the game industry, and it's growing at such a rate that we foresee that there will continue to be a lot of opportunity in games.

Vincent Boudreau42:57

Stan, what do you think?

Stan Altman42:59

Well, I think I agree with Alia, but I think the other side of it is part of what's happening in New York is to change the culture of the games that are being created. And that's, I think why the whole issue in the city pronouncements and the report that Momey put out talks about equity and why we are working up in Harlem, up in Manhattan, in the South Bronx. And I think from that perspective, I would say to young people is that if that's your dream, pursue it. I think we're trying to send a message through this program that people believe in your ability to be creative and to contribute, and that we are providing for you at City College and through the gaming program, opportunities to explore and learn about skills.

But just like playing a game, if you come up and you decide that ultimately that's not what you want to do, there are other opportunities. And so the ability and willingness to take risks and not think about it as I'm going to make a big mistake in my life, I think at the early age is the time to explore what your real passions are. So I would say that the message we're trying to send is a very positive one that young people of color have the skills, creativity, and need to contribute to society about the way they see the world, like everybody else has contributed to get their voice on the table. And I think that's, again, I don't want to be the advertising agency for City College, but that was why it got created in 1847. I mean, that's the reason people like me were able to come up and get an education and do what I've done, so.

Vincent Boudreau44:42

Yeah, I don't know why you don't want to be the advertising agency for City College. It works for me. Look, you've heard two things from our guests today. You've heard that this is a vital and rapidly growing field of economic opportunity in the city, and it's going to keep moving in that direction. And it's not that often that we all get clued into the ground floor of something that's going to be big, and it's going to be big and it's going to be bigger. The other thing that I think we heard in what Stan just said is so often when we're talking about young people in the communities around a place like City College, we talk about what are their skills deficits? How do we fill the gap between what they have and what other people have? In this industry the experiences and the skills and the inclinations and the tastes and the abilities that you have developed in these communities playing games are leading the industry, not following it.

You're not catching up to anybody. If you are a kid on Lenox Avenue who's been playing games for 10 years, your perspective is probably more valuable than anybody else's. That right there, what's the opposite of a perfect storm? You've got an industry that's taking off and you are in rich possession of the skills to be successful in that industry. And if you want to polish those skills, now I will be the advertising agency for City College. We have a program for you here at City College. It's called the Gaming Pathways Program, and we're tremendously excited about that. We've also been tremendously excited about this conversation you at home have been listening to, From City to the World.

Want to do a special thanks to our guests, CCNY, professor Dr. Stan Altman, who is the co-founder of the Harlem Gallery of Science, and the godfather of the Gaming Pathways Program at City College and Ms. Alia Jones-Harvey, who is Associate Commissioner for Workforce Development and Educational Initiatives at the NYC Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. This show, From City to the World, was produced by yours truly, Vince Boudreau and Angela Harden. Hope to see you again or hear you again next month for From City to the World. Thanks for listening, everybody.