Abstract:
Everyone and everything communicates. Over time, humans have devised and used 
different means of communications, surely to coexist, survive, and organize,
but also to build and maintain connections with family, friends, coworkers, and
so on. Some humans have sought to communicate more broadly across space and time,
not so much connecting with familiar beings, but rather planting ideas. Other
humans, however, sought to focus their communications inwardly in pursuit of
personal discovery and growth. With technological advances came naturally new
media of communications with ever increasing reach and power. The pace of
technological advancement, however, has not been constant over human existence,
but has rather been constantly accelerating. The most recent advent of the
information age with its technologies of networking and interactivity have
dramatically changed how we live, learn, work, and play. These technologies
have also changed how we choose to organize ourselves - the very essence of
the notion of community - as well as how we discover, communicate, and grow.
Video games are a strong manifestation of the power of interactive networked
technologies, and the arts and sciences that underpin digital game development
open up new and exciting avenues of human thought, discovery, and growth. As we 
learn how to harness the coupling of bits and neurons, we will be bringing
together imagination, thinking, feeling, and expression, with heretofore
unfathomable consequences on every aspect of the human experience. What will
we say with pixels?

The Guildhall at SMU was incubated in 2002 as a direct response to the expressed
needs of the gaming industry's leaders for professionals who have been educated
and trained at the intersection of the arts and sciences of digital game
development. The novel curriculum that emerged combined the benefits of the
academic and apprenticeship models to help produce immediate practitioners and 
future leaders for an emerging discipline that will undoubtedly play a key role
in how human beings will express themselves and interact.