Originally located at the SMU's
Plano, Texas facilities, Guildhall relocated to SMU's main campus in central Dallas at the Gerald J. Ford Hall for Research and Innovation in 2020. The master's program was created in 2003 from a specific request by gaming industry leaders in the United States, who saw a need in the industry to equip game creators with the skills required for the future. The program has graduated 1100 alumni, who have worked at 350 studios on hundreds of game titles. Faculty are all hired directly from industry, and have worked on more than 300 professional games at 40+ game studios. Games, student projects, and research teams have also won awards at competitions including: Game Developers' Conference Game Narrative Review, Intel University Games Showcase, SMU Research Day, TechTitans Edge Computing Grand Challenge, Certain Affinity Portfolio Competition, MoMoCon Indie Game Competition, Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPrize, DICE Summit Intel Scholarship and Diversity Award and Randy Pausch Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Scholarship, SXSW Indie Gaming Competition, E3 College Game Competition, Red Bull Clash Course, HackTX, 20 over 20 Hackathon, Industry Giants Student Art and Animation Competition, GDC Online Narrative, Blizzard Entertainment's Student Art Contest, Indie Game Challenge, STEM Video Game Challenge, Independent Game Festival Competition, Intel Game Demo Contest, Texas Instruments DLP Products Next Generation Gaming Projectors Competition, and the Make Something Unreal “Educational Category”. Over $10M in research funding and awards including federal (NSF, DoE, DoJ) and non-profit grants. Works by both students and faculty have been featured in papers, publications, interviews, articles, and talks, with 20+ publications at top Academic Gaming Conferences including ACM AIIDE, IEEE Conference on Games, IEEE Serious Games and Applications for Health, and Foundations of Digital Games), plus biomedical, chemistry, and education journals and conferences. Guildhall research has been used for: discovering drug treatments for diseases, fighting human trafficking, VR training to prevent sexual harassment and Reducing Victimization Among Adolescent Girls, reducing bias in AI facial recognition, improving adult literacy, VR surgical training for cancer treatment, and more. SMU houses the M3, one of the fastest supercomputers in the nation, which is used for computational research. == Events ==