Academics at Napier claim that the new course could help a range of professionals, music producers, screenwriters and journalists spot potential gaps in the market for new businesses.

The programme has received Scottish Government support in recognition of its potential to support Scotland's small businesses, with funding for five of the 15 places available on the course, which starts next month.

Mark Grindle, (right) games writing lecturer at Edinburgh Napier, will be programme leader. He has written, script edited, produced and executive produced over 200 hours of film and television in the US and UK. Trained at the UCLA Graduate Screenwriting programme before working in development for Columbia Pictures, hewas executive producer on the Scottish Screen/ Scottish Television BAFTA-nominated and RTS award-winning New Found Land drama series.

Grindle said: "We have developed this course in response to the rapid growth of the UK gaming sector. Many of the big success stories in the gaming industry have evolved from small companies.

"Crucially, and especially significant in the current climate, graduates from this new programme will be able to prepare business cases to support further funding, production and distribution of their work."

The course offers stimulous and competition for Abertay University in Dundee where  the School of Computing and Creative Technologies is dedicated to this subject.

Scotland is established as home to award-winning interactive entertainment companies, including Rockstar North and Realtime Worlds, creator of Crackdown and the anticipated All Points Bulletin, a multi-player online community game.

The Napier postgraduate degree will explore a wide range of digital media, as well as computer games,  aiming to develop valuable content and intellectual properties for entertainment, life, health, educational and other applications.

Following in the Wright path
Will Wright, (left )the creator of top-selling videogame "The Sims," since leaving Electronic Arts April to run entertainment think tank "Stupid Fun Club," now views himself as an "entertainment designer" rather than games maker and wants to create worlds crossing every spectrum of media.

Wright is working on new franchises that can go beyond games to the Web, mobile devices, and traditional Hollywood outlets like television and film and said he was fascinating by watching gamers using the editing tools provided with "Spore" to make over 100m user-generated alien species, space ships and even design games.

"We're taking the idea that you can have a million people engaged not just in entertainment, but also have them creating huge amounts of content for other people to experience," he says. "The question is how can you transfer that to other fields besides games.

In an industry that has more failures than successes, Wright distinguished himself in the game world by attracting mainstream audiences to his creations. "The Sims" franchise has sold over 100m copies worldwide and it's relationship-focused, non-violent gameplay has attracted an unprecedented female gaming audience, half of "Sims" players are female.

""The Sims" was always an experiment,"  Wright says "We never thought it'd be a mainstream thing. We simply did a game and started adding expansion packs and did a sequel and added more expansion packs."

He says good examples of "cross-media" companies were George Lucas' empire, which runs the gamut from special effects house Industrial Light & Magic to LucasArts and LucasFilm, and the Walt Disney Company. 

Wright also pointed to J.J. Abrams' "Lost" television show, which has used the Internet, as well as games, to build a story expanding beyond the serialized content.

Speaking at SIGGRAPH, the annual gathering of computer graphics professionals, Wright said the fusion of technology will enable future entertainment to be more than interactive.

"Games and stories are generative with one leading to the other," said Wright, adding that games allow people to build models in a virtual world to apply back to the real world.