Imagine sitting in front of your computer and playing brand new video games no one has ever heard of — and getting paid for it.Electronic Arts Inc. will partner with LSU to create a new “global quality assurance” test center on campus — the first of its kind in North America. Gov. Bobby Jindal announced the partnership Thursday at a press conference, making this dream job for many students a reality.The video game testing center will provide about 200 part-time jobs for LSU, Southern University and Baton Rouge Community College students to test new software for the EA Sports title for glitches and about 20 full-time jobs for the Baton Rouge community. Payroll for the project is supposed to increase to about $5.7 million within its first two years.The 20,000-sq ft. Louisiana Business and Technology Center building on the LSU South Campus will house the testing center.EA will hire students from mid-October until January, and testing may start as early as October. Mariam Sughayer, EA senior manager of corporate communications, said there are no technical qualifications for students to be hired.EA’s move to Baton Rouge is mainly the result of efforts to attract the company by the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium — made up of LSU, the Mayor-President’s office, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and Louisiana Economic Development.The development is meant to advance Baton Rouge’s agenda to establish a digital media economy and its attempts to attract other gaming, digital effects and animation companies in the future. EA will take advantage of a digital media tax credit, through which interactive digital media companies earn up to a 20 percent tax credit against their expenditures in Louisiana.”With more than $10 billion per year in U.S. sales and an expected growth rate of nearly 10 percent per year for the foreseeable future, the video game development industry is likely to be one of the most exciting growth sectors for many years to come,” said Stephen Moret, LED secretary, according to a governor’s office press release.The testing center will provide employment opportunities for students and a forum for the University to expand its research in digital music, animation and digital art, said Brooks Keel, vice chancellor of research and economic development. Digital media is a clean, booming industry — larger than the film and music industries combined, he said. “We hope that … three or four years down the road, we will get the development part of the game — true developers,” Keel said. “That’s where the real high-paying jobs are; that’s where the real research is; that’s when they sit around and dream up games that haven’t even been thought of.”Keel said EA is also eager to take advantage of interaction with University faculty and researchers to design first-ever human-computer interaction games.”With our Center for Computation and Technology, we have some of the world’s most powerful computational power on campus and throughout the state,” Keel said.Sughayer said the company usually keeps open environments in its facilities, so walls will be knocked down in early September.Other perks attracting the company to Baton Rouge are the University’s sports culture and the digital media curriculum currently under construction by AVATAR (Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research).  “We’ll develop this curriculum that’ll be training the workforce that the industry needs,” Keel said. “It’s going to attract the industry to come to town in this area and provide that opportunity for employment, so students will have real life internships in the companies.”The AVATAR Teaching Initiative is a multidisciplinary hiring agenda for the University looking for six new faculty to research intelligent and responsive systems like video games, collaborative media arts, training systems and medical simulations.Stephen Beck, director of the Lab for Creative Arts and Technologies in CCT, helped to develop the initiative and said the curriculum will train students to the standards of large companies like EA. “EA would not have come to LSU if it wasn’t for all of the work that had been done on campus,” Beck said. “It really gave EA the confidence that they were going to be able to find qualified, quality students who would do well in their QA program.”Beck said he already taught a high-definition correspondence course on video game design last year between LSU and University of Illinois at Chicago. Keel said CCT hopes to have more courses available as early as the fall but definitely by the spring. Eric Seidel, computer engineering junior, took the video game design class with Beck this past year and has recently done work with a University professor creating alternative devices for controlling computers. He said it surprised him that EA decided to set up shop in Baton Rouge, and he might try testing games in the facility.But he said it will not be as much fun as students would initially expect.”People get the idea that you’re getting hired to test games, and that means you’re just going to play games. That’s not what it is,” Seidel said. He said testers will have to play parts of the game over and over until they make something go wrong and have to document it.”I don’t think I’d have the patience for that,” Seidel said.—-Contact Sarah Lawson at [email protected]