The IML’s Digital Studies Symposium presents Dan Goods, Visual Strategist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Goods’ work includes large, pubic interactive media projects that communicate scientific ideas, as well as more personal art projects. For his upcoming presentation, Goods will focus on a new interactive installation, Beneath the Surface: NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter, currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, as well as eCLOUD, a dynamic, data-driven sculpture installed at the San Jose International Airport. The talk will take place Monday, September 26, at 7:00 p.m. in the Ron Howard Screening Room of the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. Please come!

Present Tense at the Kayne Griffin Corcoran September 15-December 17

The closest Skyspace open to the public is at Pomona College.

Speaker:     Lucy Hood – Executive Director, USC Institute for Communication Technology Management
Time:           Wednesday, September 21, 6-8pm
Location:    USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Lucy Hood is a highly respected industry expert on corporate strategy and business innovation in telecommunications and digital entertainment. Prior to joining USC’s Marshall School of Business, Hood was formerly President of Fox Mobile Entertainment and CEO of Jamba, one of the industry’s largest mobile entertainment companies.

Lucy Hood is widely known as an architect of corporate digital strategy, building News Corporation’s mobile business to hundreds of millions through partnerships with companies such as Nokia, Vodafone, ATT, Qualcomm, and Verisign.

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CTIN 511/ Fall  2011  Course Schedule

Time:           Wednesdays,  6-8pm

Location:    USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

1. 8/24    Intro and IMD orientation
2. 8/31     IMD Research
3. 9/7       John Underkoffler and Kate Hollenbach, Oblong
4. 9/14    Ben Hooker, ACCD
5. 9/21    Lucy Hood, USC CTM
6. 9/28    Erin Hoffman, Zynga
7. 10/5    Hideo Kojima
8. 10/12   Chris Charla, Microsoft
9. 10/19  Ken  Lobb,  Microsoft
10. 10/26  Matt Hooper, Zenimax
11. 11/2     Michael John, EA
12. 11/9     Josh McVeigh, USC iMAP
13. 11/16   Richard Lemarchand, Naughty Dog
14. 11/23  Holiday -  no class
15. 11/30  IMD Project showcase

Indiecade Finalists Announced

Congratulations Elizabeth AND Tracy, Sean, Jesse, Jonghwa, David Turpin, Andrea, Anna, Simon, and Elizabeth again (The Witch and Application Crunch)

“The International Festival of Independent Games is the only stand-alone independent-focused game event in the nation, open to both the industry and the general public. This year’s edition will be held October 6-9, 2011, once again taking over galleries, cafes, and theatres across Downtown Culver City in a celebration of independent games of every genre and platform from around the world.”

The Digital Studies Symposium presents Alex Braidwood on Monday, September 19, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. in SCA 112. Braidwood is a designer, media artist and design educator whose work centers on play, experimentation and research through making. In recent efforts, Braidwood has explored methods for transforming the relationship between people and the noise in their environment, which he will present in a talk titled “Machines for Listening.”

This semester I’m interning at Marvel Studios here in Manhattan Beach, California while I finish my graduate thesis at USC. As an intern, I review game builds & scripts internally to ensure that the Marvel brand is being treated respectfully, and is being represented in high quality products. I am not paid for this role, but I don’t mind – in my mind, there is already a great reward nested in the purpose that drives Marvel’s business.

Marvel, unlike most companies involved in the production of video games, has a primary focus of telling stories. Their business model revolves around creating fully realized characters, great worlds, and meaningful plots and then licensing or publishing content based on those creations. In the games industry, this focus is a breath of fresh air – too often games underestimate the importance of story and undervalue it in production, creating meaningless stories or characters that exist only to justify the mechanics of the game. In contrast, Marvel’s priorities ensure that in its games the story elements receive the due diligence they deserve.

Although Marvel has published a few misfires, they also lay claim to a heavy stack of video game successes from across all eras of games history from X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse on SNES to the more modern Marvel vs. Capcom 3. This portfolio of great products will only expand in the future: Marvel is well-placed, resource-wise, with its wealth of writers and artists, to have a leading impact on games in the modern era. They employ a wealth of relevant resources that few game companies have made serious investments in, at a time when consumers are beginning to demand shorter games that include more meaningful and mature content.

Beyond the field of games, Marvel’s history of storytelling has impacted American society as a whole since the ever-heightening popularity of superheroes began in the post WW2 boom. The mass of stories spread by Marvel Entertainment has fleshed out an American mythology on the same scale as any that have come before in history, from Ancient Greece’s mythology of Odyssian heroes and polytheistic gods to Norse/Germanic mythology that spurred such nationalistic epics as Wagner’s Gotterdammerung.

This mythology has given a framework of shared experience to Americans. It has provided a wide outlet for preaching the need for such moral values as Spiderman’s famous quote “with great power comes great responsibility.” And Spiderman is not alone in being centered around a key moral conflict: many, if not most, of Marvel’s iconic characters are personifications of moral conflict that teach the reader, viewer or player, valuable lessons about how to strive for better behavior in society: they define heroism and teach Americans how to strive toward a heroic ideal.

To me, working to elevate the experiences of games that focus on story in every way possible is a driving force – one that I find aligns itself well with the mission at Marvel. I think ensuring that Marvel publishes the highest quality games possible is a goal with great benefits not just for Marvel’s profits, or the game industry’s expectations on story quality, but for American society as a whole. I think these benefits will become more and more apparent as Marvel pivots from protecting their brand in games, to proactively expanding their incredible American mythology through games.

In my time at Marvel I hope to learn a great deal about their IP, improve my ability to integrate socially in an office environment, and add as much value to their products as possible.  I hope that I can bring my integrity and creativity to Marvel games to enhance their products.  I hope, as well, that my MFA background can provide credibility to in-house critiques, my English BA can aid in my research, writing and documentation, and that my design & production skills and experience in prototyping action, RPG, fighting and adventure games can be viewed as a potential future asset.

Rooms Mansion is a fictional building consisted of sliding puzzles.

There is a legend about how the Rooms Mansion came to be what it is today.  Back in 17^th century, there was a legendary puzzle maker Baron Moriatti. Like Mozart in classical music, Moriatti was the most respected figure in the field of puzzle making for his genius in creating and solving any kind of puzzle that existed. However, even he had one secret that he could not tell anyone else. It was the existence of the Unsolvable Puzzle, which is the first puzzle he made in his childhood. Every night, he locked himself in a small room somewhere deep in his mansion, and struggled with solving the puzzle. As time goes by, his obsession to the puzzle grew abnormally, consuming his life and once-bright insight. One morning, his mansion utterly disappeared along with Moriatti himself. According to the legend, the mansion haunted by Moriatti’s ghost is still looking for a person, who will solve the Unsolvable Puzzle.

While he locked himself in his mansion, Moriatti remodeled the entire mansion to be a huge puzzle. As well as the each room of the mansion, the whole building itself became a huge sliding puzzle. Every rooms and walls are designed to be able to be slid. A stranger can either find a hidden space somewhere in the building, or get strayed and never leave the mansion.

Seen from outside, the Rooms Mansion is nothing more than a 5-floor old mansion that you can find anywhere in London. However, the mansion shows the true form of itself only to the person who is secretly invited after sunset. The seemingly barren mansion during the day gets filled with shimmering warm lights on brick-red walls filled with pictures of Baron Moriatti and his achievements. Meanwhile, on the back side of those walls are filled with complex mechanical gears and wheels.

There is no human being in the Rooms Mansion. Instead, it is full of magically enchanted creatures, such as talking book, sleeping door, and hysteric mirror lady. All these creatures, a.k.a. stewards of the Rooms Mansion, were originally people who were invited to the Rooms Mansion. They gave up solving the Unsolvable Puzzle, and cursed by the Rooms Mansion to be one of the mindless servants.

Rooms Mansion is a spatial realization of the creator’s mind. The Rooms Mansion is consisted of 4 sectors; each corresponds with the memory of Moriatti, from childhood to old age. Each sector can only be accessed once the puzzles in the previous one are solved. As one explores the Rooms Mansion, the person goes through Moriatti’s memory, and goes deeper into and deeper into his mind.

In the land where pink elephants fly at midnight, there are thousands of rolling plateaus.

Sentient beings, resembling only body parts, yet with much more developed emotional system than human beings of the 21st century inhabit this virtual world. These sentients eat air and exhale their sentiment through media. The land has no gravity, but has continuously rolling hills of bamboo, grass, marble, and sand. There is a diversity of terrain — from open spaces/bandwidth to more cluttered data sockets.

Because of the lack of gravity, every time the sentient being collides with other objects on the rolling hills, it gets totally disoriented. The objective of the experience is to see how all the objects in the world link together when the moment of “disorientation” hits.

Once the being if able to visualize the network, then it becomes reoriented and starts breathing air and exhaling tweets again.

The world of repetition is identical to ours expect for two important distinctions. First, the world of the repetition tends to have duplicates of its various components at any given time. There are only identical twins that are ever born to mammals and usually triplets break open from the eggs of reptiles. You’ll have to speak twice for anyone to understand you, everything costs twice the amount that it actually does(yes, you get paid twice your salary also,) you get two spouses to sleep with, two religions to waste you life over, you get the idea..

Second, it’s shaped like a 3 layered cake. The middle layer is most like earth, and this is where all creatures are born into first. The layer on top can be considered Heaven. People and creatures that die in the middle layer either end up in the bottom layer(hell) or the top layer. All the characteristics of repetition that I mentioned above prevail in all three layers. Again, based on the behavior of the living creatures in the middle layer, their souls either sleep-climb a ladder up to Heaven or down to Hell after they die.

Life in Heaven is much like life in the middle layer, except that everyone in Heaven is quite rich, comes down to Earth from time to time to toy with the earth-dwellers. Hell ofcourse is in a frozen state of utter squalor ruled by a select few from Heaven who commute to Hell everyday.

Oh, and the whole world, the cake, blows up every 50,000 years or once its reached its repetition limit to regenarate itself.

More on this soon..