Bill Steele/Cornell Chronicle

Don Holden, left, watches as Spencer Perrault plays the game they created, White Out, which uses advanced lighting effects to create ghosts for the player to shoot down. The game helped Holden land a job with Valve Corp., a leading producer of video games including Half-Life and Portal.

Bill Steele/Cornell Chronicle

Hundreds gathered in an Upson Hall computer lab May 9 to play games created by students over the past semester. How the crowd reacts can become part of the students' final grades.

Most finals aren't this much fun.

Students in game-design courses end the semester with a public event where hundreds of visitors come to watch and play the computer games they have created. How players react to the games can be reflected in the final grade, said Walker White, director of the Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC). "When people play the game, I look at what they're getting out of it," White said. Games are made by teams, and evaluations by teammates also figure into the final grade, he added.

This year's Game Design Expo, held May 9 in Upson Hall, featured 18 games -- more than in most years, White said. Most games offered the polish and graphic sophistication of commercial games, though not usually as many levels of play. Students retain intellectual property rights in their creations, should they decide to develop them further into commercial products.

About half of students who take the basic game-design course go on to advanced courses, and about half of those land jobs in the multibillion-dollar game industry, White said. Often, he added, success in finding a job depends on the portfolio of games the student has built as an undergraduate. Thanks to the state of the economy, however, a number of this year's grads have had to settle for internships.

Among the more popular games this year were White Out, a game of shooting ghosts that are enhanced with new lighting algorithms to create more realistic light and shadow; Gamut, a get-there-from-here-without-getting-killed game in which players can rearrange obstacles by changing the color of the world; and Comet, a high-definition game for the Xbox. Fuzzle Puzzle, a game of combining colors, took third place in the annual Games 4 Girls competition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bringing home a $1,000 prize. A Cornell team took first place in 2006. "We're in the top three every year," White noted.

All the games will be available for download within about a month at the GDIAC Web site, http://gdiac.cis.cornell.edu/.