The indie academy: Promoting gaming communities through university collaboration

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Rockwell, Geoffrey
  • Gouglas, Sean

• Introduction: Universities face significant pressures to commercialize and license intellectual property (IP). With declining or stagnant government funding, research offices and education ministries have looked to software licensing and technology transfer as possible avenues to make up these shortfalls. Governments also look to universities to be engines of innovation that create new IP and spin off companies. Such is the case with computer gaming research. There is a perception that there is tremendous potential to commercialize such research, particularly given the remarkable increase in gaming production budgets. This is a mistake. Universities need to be flexible and relinquish IP rights in order to engage the Indie development community in ways that benefit both universities and developers more directly. Aside from the fact that most university gaming IP is generally unsuitable for commercial gaming, the perception of potential misses the mark.

• Date created

  2013

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Video games
  • Intellectual property rights
  • Commercialization of research
  • Universities

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R39C6SD9Z

• License

  © 2013 Sean Gouglas et al. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.