Speakers: Brenda Brathwaite and John Romero
Time: Wednesday, October 6, 6-8 pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122
John Romero
“Masters Among Us”
Artists in other mediums look back upon their masters and, intrigued, inspired or challenged by their methods and works, they innovate upon them in dramatic ways. Just as Cubism followed Impressionism, so too did RPGs follow war games and 3D follow 2D. Since the dawn of the digital industry, game designers and programmers pushed technology beyond its bounds, and on the granular level, millions of seemingly trivial mechanic innovations made the medium and cultural art form what it is today. Our masters still walk among us. Interestingly, however, few practicing game designers and even fewer experiencing their works know the masters among them. Study of their methods has fallen to consumption of modern output. Careful consideration of design methods has given way to repeating past failures. Regrettably, many of our works, like the works of the Renaissance, are simply lost or the design process unrecorded. John Romero discusses the masters among us, who they are, why we need them, how they have influenced today’s greatest games and what we will learn from them in the future.
Brenda Brathwaite
Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned How to Love Design)
How does a game designer fall deeply, passionately in love with their field again? How does one come to believe that the game mechanic is more powerful than photography, paint and the written word? Veteran game designer Brenda Brathwaite chronicles her journey on this path. Returning to her native paper prototyping, Brathwaite started work upon a series of six intentionally non-digital ‘gallery games’ each designed to explore a difficult topic. Currently working on the fourth game in the series, One Falls for Each of Us, Brenda’s work so far has resulted in both awards and the highest praise she’s ever received for a game. In this talk, Brathwaite discusses her inspiration for the unlikely series of games, shows work in progress, and provides a postmortem on the most well known game in the series, Train.