Malcolm Perdue faces a dilemma as challenging as the computer games he loves to play. The 19-year-old student at Atlanta Metropolitan College wants to learn how to become a game designer. Not only would doing so be a lot of fun, designers can make $80,000 a year early in their careers. But his school has limited options in the field. Nearby Georgia Institute of Technology and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), which has an Atlanta campus, offer full curricula in game design, but SCAD costs nearly $28,000 a year in tuition alone, and Georgia Tech demands high math scores. Indeed, minority students may find their options limited for what is a fast-growing and lucrative field. Experts are aware of the lack of minorities in the game design field and say they are working for improvements. "Gaming is a wonderful opportunity to bring nontraditional students into various fields of college study," says Dr. Keith Moo-Young, dean of the California State University, Los Angeles College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology. Yet as the gaming industry becomes more sophisticated, demands are becoming tougher for students wanting to enter the field. It's not enough, academic director Matthew Maloney says, to simply study animation or modeling and leave it at that. These days, a student starting out must learn to think on several planes at once and never lose their sense of what a "game" is, he says.