Jan
10
Jeanine Cowen Personal Goals and Interests
January 10, 2013 | Comments Off
About me – I’ve lived now in Boston for over 25 years. My kids call it home but they like to remind me that I am from Iowa, they find that incredibly foreign as I’m sure you can imagine for three city boys! I started my undergrad at Northwestern University, at the time there was no such thing as “music technology” so I was enrolled in a dual degree program with music and computer science. (Completely unconnected) I transferred to Berklee College of Music because they had an honest to goodness music technology program.
I spent about 15 years freelancing as a composer fulltime, during which I also had the opportunity to work for several software development companies. In the beginning, working on PC games, any type of sound was intrinsically technical to include, so that’s really where I think I got this “bug” called ITGM!
Technology has always been a part of my DNA and remains so in a big way today. Fast forward and I’ve returned to my alma mater, first as a part-time professor, then full-time professor, and now as an administrator, Vice President for Curriculum and Program Innovation. Games however, continue to draw me in and my hope is to begin making games again after I finish the MFA.
As an ITGM student I’ve had a fantastic opportunity to learn more deeply about what it is that makes a great game really great. I’ve also become more and more interested in the future of video games and what their societal impact/use will be/become. So it is truly a combination of both of those areas that continues to motivate me today.
I spent a large chunk of my professional life working on films where working on a blockbuster is great fun and the entertainment value is worth the effort you put in. In parallel, working on a documentary is very personally satisfying, it is intense work and highly emotional at times. This is the dichotomy, or rather really the range, that I see in video games as a discipline. We haven’t quite gotten there on the equivalent of a documentary (I don’t think) but we all know the blockbusters will continue coming out and getting better, for entertainment, as they progress.
So my personal goals reside in diving into interactive development and design. What I’ve found over the years is that I personally need to be in a creative and collaborative environment in order to feel my work is of value. My goals then are to re-enter the game development industry in a new role, in the role of a producer or designer. At this point I can’t say whether I’d prefer to work for a company or whether I might just start-up an indie house, but I do know that I will again be engaged on video game projects in one way or another.
Through my thesis project I hope to be able to build more competency as an interactive innovator, looking at games through a lens that can extend some part of what we know or perhaps connect knowledge in a way that might reveal how things come together via the interactivity.
Exciting times indeed!