UCLA Arts: Design/Media Arts

It’s a Gamer’s World

Adeline Ducker, a fourth-year UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) student, is designing a game to further develop a concept she thought up in one of her DMA classes. In Ducker’s game, players control Landon Everett, a man plagued by his dissociative identity disorder. His multiple personalities include a World War II veteran and a manipulative Mormon mother. “The idea was to create a character that was at conflict with himself,” Ducker says.

Eddo Stern, a DMA professor at UCLA says Ducker’s game is just one example of his main objective: to take advantage of the gaming medium’s potential for depth and expand the field into something that’s more than just entertainment. “Games have great potential for social and cultural impact. We want to push the medium independent of the industry and incorporate more complex narratives and more serious subjects,” Stern says.

The DMA department strives to create this social and cultural relevance in each course. Giving to DMA helps support a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach to media creation that fosters individual exploration and innovative thinking. The results create the art we see every day in and on books, game consoles, installations, films, magazines, performances, television shows, websites and public spaces.

DMA is committed to educating conscientious creators by emphasizing production within the context of history and theory. The core curriculum is augmented by a series of vital lectures, workshops and other events, and we actively encourage our students to pursue additional interests within the university.

DMA also operates several state-of-the-art instructional and service labs, including a video lab dedicated to digital and audio editing, two digital audio facilities, a fabrication lab for construction and a dedicated electronics lab for interactive and electronic installations. In addition, the department has a print lab equipped with laser printers, ink jet printers and large-format plotters, a shoot room for photography and video production, and research and graduate labs.