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One of the people behind Sony Playstation III's 'Uncharted' video games series has been
given an honorary degree by Glasgow Caledonian University.
Professor Richard Lemarchand, a former lead designer with 'Naughty Dog', who helped drive
the concept for the blockbuster 'Uncharted' series, was awarded an honorary degree of
Doctor of Technology. >> RICHARD: Becoming an honorary graduate
of GCU is such an incredible honour for me. It's not something that I'd ever anticipated
would happen to me in my life, and to have an honour like this bestowed upon me when
I've had such an amazing career working with all of the incredible game developers that
I've worked with. And really just leaves me feeling overwhelmed.
The people that I've met at GCU are all so amazing and to be, kind of, joining you with
this honorary doctorate has really left me quite speechless so I'm really grateful to
the great honour that this award signifies.GCU's Video Games course has a great international reputation.
I mean the level of the work that is done here, both in terms of the science
and the art of game development, is well-known far and wide and so it's great for me finally
to come and visit here and see the kind of work that's being done here. In the Motion
Lab, with virtual reality and simulation, and with the kind of rigorous statistical
game design that I really came to adopt through my work at Naughty Dog, it's been a great day.
I'm really excited to be here.I had an amazing time working in the games industry.
I had more than twenty amazing years, every minute of which I loved, working in the creation
of console games. But over the course of the last eight years or so, I've become very excited
by the possibilities offered up by the world of indie games and latterly the world of art
games. And I realised a little while ago that I had a great opportunity to make a slight
career change to allow me to come into more day-to-day contact with those kinds of games.
So even though it was a big wrench for me to leave an amazing place like Naughty Dog, taking
on a role at USC, teaching game design and also making experimental games as part of
a design research project, was an opportunity that was too good to pass up on. So I now
feel very lucky that I can take all of the experience that I have from the world of games
and help to bring along the next generation of game designer.
There is such a great interplay that's arisen over the course of the last decade, between
games and the Academy, and games in industry,that both fields have very great respect,
one for the other. Certainly when we look at the kinds of work that is being done here
at GCU we can see that there are very many immediate postiive benefits that the games
industry can take away from the research being done here. So I think we're in for a great
future of very intense collaboration between universities and video games companies.