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"At Southern Methodist University, you can now major in video games. Finally, a degree more useless than political science." - Jay Leno

Ashley Eldred was trying to figure out how to make Hell into a cuter place.

The young blonde woman with a confident manner is a student at the Guildhall at SMU - the school Jay Leno was talking about that teaches students how to make video games. On a recent morning, she and her colleagues were brainstorming about her idea for a game, which is called Hell's Belle and concerns a heroine who tries to keep Hell from being overtaken by an invasion of cutesiness. Though she, like all the students here, is extremely tech-savvy, the air was popping with creative energy.

Ashley's idea was one of two chosen by the lecturers and fellow students to be turned into working games, as final projects for the class. Ideas came thick and fast - should the main character's enemies be monsters that were failing to be cute (someone suggested a giant scary demon with cat ears) or things that were genuinely cute but lethal (like the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

The class of 28 students is run by lecturers Sandy Petersen and Elizabeth Stringer, who, like the Guildhall's other faculty, have no academic experience but long years of work in the industry that qualifies them to educate students in the game-making process. When Leno made his wisecrack years ago as host of The Tonight Show, he no doubt was imagining rooms full of guys in their 20s staring slack-jawed at screens, their hands practically glued to controllers and their brains locked in that focused yet numb mental state that often comes from playing video games for hours on end. True, the class was roughly 75 percent male and mostly in their 20s, but women and older men were also represented, and the fast, creative discussion didn't leave any room for trance states.

Some people dismiss video games themselves as frivolous, but as a business they're clearly no joke. While there's talk that the video game industry is beginning to stagnate, it still took in $22 billion last year worldwide. Two weeks ago, the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 grossed $550 million in sales in its first five days, almost as impressive as the numbers for 2008's biggest-selling movie, The Dark Knight, during its entire theatrical run and with a much smaller investment ($40 million to $50 million in production costs, as opposed to The Dark Knight's $185 million).

That kind of money can be a big boost to areas where video game companies tend to cluster, and Texas is beginning to get its share. Austin is home to more game companies than any U.S. region except Seattle and the San Francisco Bay area. In Austin, that translates to about 3,000 jobs.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area isn't far behind with 22 gaming companies providing about 1,500 jobs thus far. The best known are Mesquite's id Software - maker of the Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake games - and Plano's Gearbox Software, which created Halo and Half-Life. With the Guildhall at SMU going full tilt and other local schools beginning to consider similar courses, the North Texas area is clearly hoping to take a bigger bite out of this lucrative market.

The Guildhall at SMU is run by Dr. Peter Raad, a cultivated, gray-haired man whose slightly accented speech indicates his Lebanese origins. The school's name doesn't refer to the building that houses it, but to the idea of guilds for artisans and skilled workers that dates back to the medieval period so beloved by gamers. Raad started as the founding director of the Hart eCenter for Interdisciplinary Studies in 2000, which was set up as a think tank to deal with the economic and cultural possibilities of the then-emerging technology of the internet. Two years later, the video game industry came looking for a school with both expertise in interactive technology and experience in teaching students from differing backgrounds.

At that point, the gaming industry was already out-earning Hollywood, and it needed trained professionals to keep up with product demand. "When you have such rapid expansion, the question is, do you have enough team members," said Raad. "You need experts in animation, engine building, character modeling. One person can't make a game anymore."

Raad's interdisciplinary background also shows in his conversation, which is strewn with similes from other kinds of work. In roughly an hour, he compares the teamwork among the gaming industry's different sectors to that of lawyers, basketball players, and orchestra musicians. While video game education at other schools (such as IT University's Center for Computer Games Research in Copenhagen) focuses on the theory and cultural significance of games, the Guildhall is more industry-oriented. "We are like a dental school," said Raad, using another occupational comparison. "You go to dental school to become a dentist. You come here to design video games. We are about specific, channeled, professional preparation."

To that end, the Guildhall offers an 18-month master's program in interactive technology with a professional certificate in digital game development. A bachelor's degree is required to get in, though not of any specific kind. Raad points out that his students have included military veterans, Wall Street brokers, architects, even an opera singer and an oil-rig worker. Students choose from among  three specialties: art creation, level design (which involves storytelling and imagining the details of the world within the game), and software development (rendering the concepts from the other two into playable code). Each specialty requires a portfolio that is submitted as part of the application process.

The program is so intensive that few students can hold part-time jobs to help defray the $50,000 tuition cost, though financial aid and scholarships are available. There is a heavy emphasis on teamwork, and incoming students are placed on identical tracks called "cohorts" so that they work and study together throughout the 18 months. The school estimates that 96 percent of graduates land jobs in the video gaming industry, in which entry-level positions pay $40,000 to $50,000 a year. Top workers can pull down six-figure salaries (plus bonuses when the games they've worked on hit the market), and CEO pay and benefits can exceed $10 million.