Brayden Binkley, a recent graduate of Centralia High School, plays the video game Red Redemption 2 last year. Binkley was attending the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond to study programming before his recent car crash.
Brayden Binkley, a recent graduate of Centralia High School, plays the video game Red Redemption 2 on Monday morning. Binkley will be attending the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond to study programming.
When most people sit down to play a video game, they’re looking for a few moments of reprieve from the trials and tribulations of daily life, whether through the eyes of a plumber named Mario or a freewheeling mob soldier.
When recent Centralia High School graduate Brayden Binkley picks up a controller, he does so with an eye on his future. Binkley spent two years of his high school career dual-enrolled at the New Market Skills Center in Tumwater. He took classes on computer science and programming each morning, then returned to CHS to attend the more traditional classes required of high school students.
Binkley’s experience as a computer science student will continue with the pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in video game design and development at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond. The school there is one of the first to offer a four-year degree on the subject and attracts students from around Washington seeking to break into the industry.
“I want to pursue programming for video games specifically because I want to share that same enjoyment and excitement with other people that the games have given me,” Binkley said. “I knew I wanted to do that as a career, so throughout high school, I took as many computer and programming classes as I could. My goal is to someday work at Rockstar Games, which developed the Grand Theft Auto franchise.”
Binkley grew up playing all sorts of video games, but his interest in back-end development didn’t come to the forefront until he was about 12 years old. A friend pulled up some programming language on a computer and typed out code that made the program display a customized message.
Thoroughly fascinated, Binkley quickly became hooked on computer science and took as many classes on the subject as he could at Centralia High School. He obtained official certification of his skill level with Microsoft Office during his freshman year and later earned master-level recognition on some of those programs.
“Brayden is a super bright kid,” said Lance Ulrigg, a career and technical education instructor at CHS who teaches courses on robotics and a number of software suites. “He’s one of the smartest kids I’ve ever met. He’s a tremendous kid with unlimited potential. I think he’s going to do really well in life and has a great future ahead of him.”
As a high school junior, Binkley enrolled in the DigiPen computer science class taught by Thomas Foster at the New Market Skills Center. The school opened in Tumwater in 1986 as a co-venture between multiple school districts across Lewis and Thurston counties, including those in Centralia, Rochester and Tenino.
According to its website, New Market strives to “prepare students for the workforce by offering the opportunity to be trained in technical career areas too expensive for a single district to fund.” Foster said he connected quickly with Binkley and helped him with a variety of projects, including the creation of a game featuring a number of carnival-style activities.
“(Binkley) is a soft-spoken young man who consistently works hard,” Foster said. “He primarily worked with the Unity script this year, which is the a mainstream, professional engine. My goal is to lay a foundation so that when students continue up to a place like DigiPen in Redmond, or a school like Centralia College, we prep them for that with at least the fundamentals of computer science.”
Binkley credits Foster with helping him understand what it takes to have a career in the video game industry and with providing him firsthand experience on some aspects of what he’ll study at the collegiate level.
It isn’t easy to break into the field, especially at the level of Rockstar Games, which has made an estimated $6 billion in revenue from the most recent Grand Theft Auto game released in 2013, but those who have aided Binkley to this point believe he has the potential to get there.
“Students just have to show up and work hard, that’s what I tell them,” Foster said. “You have to show up and work your butt off in school, but if you can do those things and pull through to get a degree and an internship, it opens up a career of doing things that (Binkley) is very passionate about and wants to make happen for himself.”
