The Top 10 Gaming Colleges 66
Pluvius writes "The top-ten list of party schools published by the Princeton Review every year has always been a popular metric among prospective American college students for determining the 'most compatible' university to attend. Because of this, the Global Gaming League has come up with a more geek-oriented list: The First Annual Top Gaming Colleges Survey. The entries were selected based on such factors as proximity to gamer meccas such as Southern California, the frequency of LAN parties, and the existence and strength of a game design curriculum. Here's an excerpt from the number one entry, UT/Austin: 'Last, if you don't feel like leaving your dorm, there's nothing to worry about. A blistering Internet connection will give you LAN pings inside Texas, 30 milliseconds of latency to the East coast and 40 to the West coast. "The Internet connection at the dorms is ****ing amazing. I was [on it] freshman year; I miss that part about moving out of the dorms."'"
Link in summary wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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Uh yeah. (Score:4, Insightful)
So this is a reason I shouldn't go to UVA? Because I "won't have time to game?" What a trite article. Maybe you should go to a university because it will give you a competitive education, not because you can ping 9ms to your favorite server?
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real party schools tend to be composed of different types of people than gamers. oil and water just doesn't want to mix sometimes.
i'm a softcore gamer who graduated from a party school and i found msyelf gaming a lot more often than partying, just becuase i didn't feel like being around 90% of the kids there. not because i didn't want to go out. (not that i didn't hit my fair share of parties and bars)
i would've probably been more inclined to party with people more similar to myself, which
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However, I can't help but feel sorry for the people I sat next to in a lecture the other day. They were talking about doing a raid the night before, while I had been hanging out in a sort of de facto block party with the coolest people I know.
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Re:Uh yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is not about higher education... it is about exspensive goofing off. There are plenty of people who find extra curicular activity and fitting in at a college important, these kind of metrics may be of value to them.
Lose the stick, it makes you walk funny.
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Uh yeah-Placeholders (Score:1, Interesting)
*And let's mention the fact that the student population is getting older and have family responsabilities.
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I typically took about 15-16 credits a semester. Which translated to 2-3 hours of lecture a day, and probably an average of 2-3 hours of homework a ni
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no, you shouldn't go to UVA simply because it is UVA. And no this isn't a biased opinion. GO Hokies!
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slashdotting! (Score:4, Funny)
How long ago it seems (Score:3, Funny)
Why, sonny, I remember back in my days when deciding on a college was a balance between how much it cost and how good the college was for the field of study you wanted. You went to college with a priority on learning. We didn't have none of these newfangled college decision making thingys that were all about partying and maybe getting a token diploma after spending four years and thousands of dollars, dagnabbit!
What's that? You're joining Delta Tau Chi? Well, that makes a bit more sense.
[/CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
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Thank heavens those distractions were all precious and expensive luxuries in my day. I wouldn't have had the mental discipline to study knowing that at the click of
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Thanks for doing your part.
The clue meter is reading zero. (Score:2)
Wow. Total cluelessness reigns supreme. You need to start watching some classic, frat house comedies.
It's a reference to the Delta House in the movie Animal House. Looks like my statement about "how long ago it seems" was more accurate than I thought.
Sheesh. { roll eyes }
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I done fucked this one up. My apologies.
It's Animal House, you insensitive clod! (Score:2)
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I now officially have egg on my face, and will be posting my apology.
Dude, don't mess up a good thing! (Score:4, Insightful)
Though, I'd rather have my kid at a school where gaming was damn easy, as opposed to a school where drinking was the only thing to do every day.
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Someone didn't get their American culture memo.
Partying is what college kids are SUPPOSED to do. College kids are SUPPOSED to go out and have promiscuous sex while too fucked up to remember it.
Gaming leaves them in their rooms, sober (well, maybe) and with few friends, not at parties, probably disliked by other people. That's not how the American College Experienc
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Friends of mine that attended places like Frostburg, or Salsbury over in MD came out of school with very few social skills other than getting drunk with random people. And the friends they made? Gone within 6 months of graduation as they spread out over the state and region.
Maybe it's somewhat different than when I went to college, but being known as "a real party animal that got crabs, herpes, and the clap while
Hate how some schools block external gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
What stunk is we were blocked from playing games on the Internet. This was back during Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Quake III, days. They blocked ports, UDP, you name it. It really stunk.
The LAN Gaming was great, particularly since you often knew the person you were playing against so I didn't mind THAT much. However, after I moved offcampus my senior year I found out that they took things a step further. They started blocking traffic between each dorm, meaning you could only play against people in your own dorm. When I asked what their reasons were, my friends just shrugged.
I don't know what the state of affairs is there now, for all I know they've opened up Internet gaming again. But it was a shame that a school ranked so highly for "being wired" that they took such steps. I know, I know... I wasn't going there to play games. But I did pretty well in school (later got my Masters) so it's not like I was a complete slacker.
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Grammaaahh (Score:2)
The top-ten list of party schools published by the Princeton Review every year has always been a popular metric among prospective American college students for determining the 'most compatible' university to attend.
Any correlation with the decline of the sciences in the USA?
"The Internet connection at the dorms is ****ing amazing."
Nice to see college is really enhancing his vocabulary.
Don't mind me. I've become and old curmudgeon.
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Whoo!! I knew RIT was good for something. (Score:1, Interesting)
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FWIW, as long as you do keep your grades up, you shouldn't have problems landing a job (well, assuming CS anyway). I never heard of RIT before my friend told me about it, but plenty of people know the name and it has a good reputation... pretty much every interviewer I've talked to is aware of it.
Told ya (Score:2)
I would've checked the lan speed... (Score:2)
Why the dig at Rochester? (Score:2)
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Plus, bars are open til 4am in some locales.
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What is that excerpt based on? (Score:3, Informative)
To the best of my knowledge, the pipe for UT-Austin is a couple of 'commodity-Internet' OC3s leased from a lone carrier (Qwest). Using the 95th percentile on UTNet's 'busy days', inbound traffic hits around ~350 Mbps. Another thing to note is that the Internet2 [wikipedia.org] uplink for UT-Austin is a Qwest OC12 (either it is or will be a GigE connection to I2 in the near future). Commodity-Internet is somewhat saturated, but decent. The big win is the I2 uplink being blazing (fast and fairly not saturated).
One of the things I experienced as a student in the dorms at UT-Austin (2000-2001) was the leveraging of a throughput quota on ResNet ports. I believe they alotted activated-for-pay ports six gigs of throughput in a given calendar week. Today, things have changed slightly [utexas.edu]:
So thats a big negative for all the 18-year old network gobblers out there who play GAMEZ and swap FILEZ.
So we are National Champions [mackbrown-...otball.com] _and_ Gaming Gods? Sweet. ;)
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To live, work and teach in Austin? Maybe. But Dallas offers more job opportunities. I'll just have to see how internships go this summer.
What a worthless article (Score:2)
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Ok, now that I'm done with that, leave it to Vandy to cry about being left out. Sorry if nobody is staring in awe at a 120+ LAN for gaming. 120? That's not even very impressive. An upcoming Counter-strike server sponsored by campus? What is this, the year 2000?
Hey everybody, the university bought us two cans and a string but nobody has contacted me about our campus' telecommunications abilities. I'll cry about it to Slashd
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Only two LANs mention how big they are. And even if you're right, the size of your LAN gaming infrastructure is only one consideration they look at.
"I've also -never- seen another school officially sponsor (e.g. provide free bandwidth, hosting, and administration) for a dedicated gaming server before."
I've never seen a school need to officially sponsor a dedicated gaming server before. I've seen planty of schools provide physical space to set up gaming servers
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OK, but why wasn't I contacted to even ask a question about our gaming community? The point was they didn't look very hard. If they can't even cover the tier 1 universities (those ranked 1-25) or universities with more then 5000 students, their list is obviously not very accurate.
"Game servers aren't that hard to come by and they don't require anything along t
University of Advancing Technology (Score:1)
I went to the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) for several years and during that whole time they were focused on their new "Gaming" program. Basically it boiled down to a "Degree of This with an emphasis in Game Design." The emphasis, of course, was basic gaming classes related to making and designing a game or the most part. If moti
No mention of NBCC-Miramichi's game-dev program? (Score:3, Informative)
RIT has come a long way... (Score:1)
Gaming schools vs. Game schools (Score:2)
Well that article will have to show up eventually.
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Already knew Georgia Tech was perfect. (Score:2)
Another #1 (Score:1)
Why Austin, Texas Kicks Ass (Score:1)
2) 5th drunkest city in the USA
3) Live music capital of the USA (possibly the world)
4) South by Southwest Festival(s)
5) We have a homeless celebrity dragqueen who runs for mayor as often as possible.
And now we can add #6: Best gaming college in the nation.
I love this city.