Commencement 2007 Remarks

Scott S. Fisher, Chair, Interactive Media Division

Scott S. Fisher, Chair

"Five short years ago, in 2002, a new division was added to the five existing departments of what was then the School of Cinema-Television. Our primary goal was to develop a program of curriculum and research in Interactive Media that looks towards the future of entertainment and education while drawing on the achievements and expertise of our colleagues in the Cinematic Arts. When a publicist asked me who is the George Lucas of this field, the only name I could respond with was “Will Wright”.

Five years later, Will is still the Charles Dickens and the George Lucas of this field but what is increasing rapidly is the sheer quantity of new media technologies that engage us in our everyday lives and beckon us to interact. There are many different kinds of video game consoles and online platforms.  We are inundated with Email, weblogs, wikis, mobile devices, text messaging, p2p file sharing, videocasting, podcasting, IPTV, aggregators, recommendation engines, search engines. We are immersed in an emerging environment of ubiquitous computing.

But it is not the hardware that people might use that will determine whether a new technology becomes a powerful medium - instead, it will be the experiences that they are able to have that will drive its acceptance and impact.

The biggest challenge for us is to explore and define this emerging field of interactive media and think about what new forms of storytelling and learning it can provide. Many of us are intrigued with the prospect of what happens when you can actually step through the screen and interact with a story world and all its characters, or viscerally become one of those characters yourself. Others are working on ways to create and present stories that respond and change in response to your input and actions.    

Today we honor the third graduating class of eleven students from our M.F.A. degree program and also

Fisher addresses the class of 2007.

the very first class of five students from our undergraduate degree in Interactive Entertainment. Overall, 16 students who, throughout their years here, have taken up this challenge and developed a deep expertise of the field and a collection of tangible and very compelling works. Imagine if you could fuse 16 very disparate points of view – the multi-dimensional result is a very profound representation of our future entertainment and lifestyle environments.

The class of 2007 has already discovered many unpredicted and unexpected uses for these new technologies. They have developed interactive experiences that enable immersive and communal play experiences; interactive experiences that evoke strong sensory interaction; interactive experiences that question our use and dependence on technology; and interactive experiences that successfully motivate us towards action for social change. Indeed members of this class have already received a number of professional awards and international visibility for their emerging creative voices. We all look forward to your future works as you continue to meet this challenge and ask questions that will change our industry forever.

Please come forward to receive your degrees."