As fate would have it, that once-subversive exercise became his career. And with the computer gaming industry poised to become the dominant entertainment medium of the twenty-first century, it has proven to be serious business indeed.

At first glance, Cyphers' vision for SVA may seem equally out-of-place. "My goal as provost," he explains, "is to pull the liberal arts in from the margins of the curriculum and establish them at the center." But for all of its ostensible incongruity, that goal is very much in accordance with changing expectations about art and the way it is taught.

As director of technology for Activision, a leading international publisher of interactive entertainment software, Brickhill writes code for cutting edge videogames and manages teams of other programmers. Writing code for sophisticated games requires extremely high-level math, and Brickhill's mathematical prowess has earned him technical roles at Sony and other major studios throughout California-the de facto hub of the industry-as well as game credits like 007 Tomorrow Never Dies and Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder. But Brickhill, who holds a US patent for advanced methods of subdivision, didn't get into an upper-management position at one of the most profitable videogame companies in the world because he is a math wiz. He got there because he is a math wiz who can communicate effectively.

"I can't tell you how valuable it is to be able to read and write and to craft cogent, brief, effective arguments," he says. "When you combine that with technical abilities, you have a highly sought after skill-set." And, according to Brickhill, you do not necessarily need to learn those technical skills in school. "Most of what you need to know for a particular industry you will have to learn once you get there anyway, but you never again have an opportunity like that to learn how to write.

SVA featured strong humanities departments, but chaotic and ad hoc organization and a lack of communications between the studio disciplines and the academic disciplines prevented any meaningful melding of the two. The position of provost was created in 2001 so that Cyphers could bridge this gap.

David Brickhill '93, at the beach in his California office garb, made his own video games as a child-and hasn't stopped.

"Did Hampden-Sydney fully prepare me for particular technical subjects? No. But it prepared me to know how to learn those things easily," he says. "Hey, if you can make it through Paradise Lost, you can work your way through a lot of things."

Brickhill finished Hampden-Sydney as second honors graduate, and his former professors remember him as a standout student and mathematician. "I always knew that if David's hand was up when I finished working a problem on the board, I had to turn around and figure out my mistake," says math professor Robb Koether, Brickhill's former advisor. "He kept us all on our toes."

When Brickhill came to college, however, math was the furthest thing from his mind. He was much more concerned with kicking field goals for the football team and lifting weights. School was just something he had to do to facilitate those activities, and he began loading up on math courses because that's where he got As. Under the tutelage of professors like Rusewicz, Cohen, Koether, and Bryce, however, math soon became his passion. "They were a huge influence on me," says Brickhill, who is quick to add non-math professors like Alan Farrell and Hassell Simpson to that list. "They stand out in my mind as models of great men. You very seldom meet people like that elsewhere." By his senior year, Brickhill decided not to play a fourth season on the football team so he could focus more on his math work.

After graduation he took a temporary job writing hand-held Nintendo Gameboy games for a tiny company in San Francisco and began applying to the best graduate math programs in the country. When he didn't get in exactly where he wanted, he decided to continue doing what he had always wanted: making video games.

The projects he completed at the struggling San Francisco company soon earned him a position at Sony, one of the biggest players in the industry. At the time Sony was creating PlayStation, a new stand-alone home gaming device. Its release marked a major turning point in the industry, and in Brickhill's career.

He soon went in search of new responsibilities and challenges. After completing projects for studios in Seattle and San Diego, he decided to start his own company, Golden Gate Game Company, and hired his former professor André Rusewicz. But the gaming industry was in the process of becoming the province of large publishers who had enough money to finance escalating development and marketing costs. A small startup became increasingly impractical, and Brickhill called it quits.

Brickhill then took his current position at Activision. (Rusewicz also continued on in the games industry-he is now with a company called Maxis.) As director of technology at Activision, Brickhill spends much of his time traveling the globe doing what he calls firefighting-checking on projects in different continents, making staffing adjustments or fixing technical problems as needed.

In the technical arena, Brickhill's primary interest is on videogame "physics," which refers to the way objects, specifically 3D renderings of humans, move around in virtual space. After determining the visual effect he's trying to achieve, based on data from human motion tests, he adapts the techniques of abstract algorithms to match his specific hardware. He then "codes it up," creating the specific software tools to give the artists the ability to convert the actual 3D content into data structures which will work with the system he has built.

While 3D effects have come a long way since Brickhill has been in the business, he says matching human motion on screen is still the next goal. "Ideally, you want a video game to create the same level of emotional attachment that movies and novels achieve," he says. "The subtleties of human movement on screen have a big impact on that. Every time a character moves differently from a real human, the player disconnects emotionally to some degree. To achieve a higher emotional level we need to fine-tune the way we recreate those movements."

Besides putting him on the forefront of videogame technology, Brickhill's current position challenges him to advance his diplomatic and political skills, and the traveling has afforded him invaluable cultural lessons. "I experienced racism directed towards me for the first time in Osaka, Japan," he says. "It was a great experience. Everyone from Hampden-Sydney should go there."

While Brickhill says he likes the "people stuff," he still revels in the technical challenges that first drew him to the industry. As he explains it, "Writing code for a game is exactly like packing a moving truck. You have a certain amount of stuff and a certain amount of space and you are trying to package it. Sometimes you can put the couch on its end, or take apart the table. When you're done you have a perfect configuration of stuff, totally unambiguous and very satisfying. I'll always love that the best."