The hottest major on America’s college campuses isn’t cultural studies, with a focus on Superman’s return or “The Sopranos,” but video game development. Yes, three decades after bursting into arcades and rumpus rooms, video games are carving a niche in academia, letting kids live their dream (why not have fun and earn a gazillion dollars?) and resuscitating a few college computer science programs along the way.

A handful of vocational schools have long taught basic game programming, but the business of game-making is a far cry from an afternoon of PlayStation 2. Top-notch schools such as the University of Denver, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Southern California (USC) now offer bachelor’s and even master’s degrees in game design and development.

Curriculum varies. Some take a cultural approach to the industry, probing the philosophy and ethics of computer games; others blend both technical and artistic aspects. Michigan State University offers a specialization in video game design and development as part of a degree that unites computer science, studio art and telecommunications. The University of Central Florida partnered with the state of Florida and games maker Electronic Arts to create the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, a graduate game development school in Orlando, where students work as producers, programmers and artists on real-world projects. At the University of Denver, students can earn either a B.A. or a B.S., depending on the academic emphasis.

Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, launched the first undergraduate major in video game design in the Northeast with 30 students in 2004. Program director Ann DeMarle received 350 applications for the 90 spots in this year’s class. “The industry needs employees, and our computer science program numbers were falling behind,” she recalls. “But this is more than just acquiring technical skills. Anyone can go to vocational school and learn computer programming. This is about a solid liberal arts foundation, a depth and breadth of education. Video game development is a renaissance degree for the digital generation.”

In the last six years, computer science enrollment dropped 60 percent nationwide, reports Scott Leutenegger, director of the Game Development Program at the University of Denver. Two years ago the university counted only eight freshman computer science students. This year it expects 60 to matriculate.

In Los Angeles, thanks to the University of Southern California’s GamePipe Laboratory and its new B.S. and M.S. degrees in game development, the computer science department scored a 44 percent increase in enrollment this fall. Michigan State has tripled the number of video game design students in a year.

Are video game degrees an attempt to boost enrollment? “Sure,” Leutenegger admits. “But it’s also about finding a way to feed bright, artistic, and technically skilled young people into a $10 billion industry.”

Though the addition of a video game major may make sense to some academics, it remains a tough sell. Faculty bodies worry about public perception and maintaining scholastic integrity. The trick is convincing the powers that be that it’s not about playing games, it’s about creating games. Not to mention that, as Leutenegger points out, this new education model, combining left- and right-brain thinking, “is applicable to many career choices, not just the game industry.”

“Seventy-five years ago when USC established a film school, people asked if this was a legitimate form of study. It’s the same with video games in 2006,” says Steve Seabolt, vice president of university and marketing education for Electronic Arts in Redwood, California. As the world’s leading publisher of video games, EA makes more than 1,000 new hires annually. And the company actively encourages top-tier colleges and universities to develop degree programs by donating software, scholarships, paid internships and curriculum counseling. “It’s in our enlightened self-interest to connect kids with their dream,” Seabolt says. “We have a near insatiable demand for high-level talent, most particularly in computer science.”

Still, playing video games is easy, building video games is hard. “It’s about critical thinking, decision-making,” Seabolt says of the latter: Successful developers need to meld art and commerce, producing projects that are not just more fun than competing products, but are also finished on time and within budget.

Even more critical is learning to “play” well with others. Randy Pausch, co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, says he’s finding that master’s degree candidates are good at what they do but have limited experience working in groups. “We don’t turn technologists into artists or vice versa,” he says. “Instead, we have students devote most of their energies as members of interdisciplinary teams completing projects in lieu of taking classes. It’s all about learning how to interact and solve day-to-day problems.”

For second-year Carnegie Mellon student designer Allen, grad school meant jumping into an unfamiliar environment from day one. “You’re assigned a team, a platform, a concept, given two weeks and go!” he explains. “Just like working at a video game company, artists and programmers have to come together. You must learn to work as a team even though you don’t share a common language.”

It works. Electronic Arts hires roughly 30 percent of the graduates from the Carnegie Mellon program. “What’s neat to see are people who are left-brain and right-brain working side by side where 1 + 1 = 3,” says Seabolt.

Still, does the world really need thousands of new video game developers? Aren’t we treading the same slippery slope that ended in the dot-com bust? Not necessarily. Many video game grads will make a name for themselves in entertainment gaming, but an equivalent number will take their game design skills into the serious games industry (gaming with military, corporate and advertising applications) or into what Leutenegger calls “humane” gaming—interactive tools for medical training, educational games, and games that reflect social consciousness or advocate for a cause.

Even the strongest skeptics—moms and dads—are won over, report students like Kotrina Keichline, a University of Denver sophomore. “My parents wanted me on a career track, and when I first told them about my new major they wondered, ‘Why devote so much time to games?’” she says. “Now they realize video games—and computer science— open the world to me.”