Anne Balsamo

Speaker: Gonzalo Frasca, Co-Founder and CCO, Powerful Robot Games

Time: Wednesday, October 28, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Play like you mean it! Videogames & Rhetoric

Please join us for a talk by Gonzalo Frasca, who is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Powerful Robot Games. His talk will describe a framework for understanding how play and games convey ideas through the use of rhetoric rather than rules.

Gonzalo Frasca is a game developer, researcher and entrepreneur, who lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. He co-founded the studio, Powerful Robot Games, in 2002 to build both commercial and experimental games. Their game for Cartoon Network reached over 13 million player accounts. They described it as "our biggest gaming success in our history".

One of their most popular indie projects is Newsgaming.com, a project mixing journalism with videogames. It received the Knight Foundation News Games Lifetime Achievement Award at the Games for Change 2009 conference.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speakers: Lulu Cao, Ala' Diab, Bryan Jaycox, Cynthia Nie, Taiyoung Ryu, Nahil Sharkasi, Peter Van Dyke, and Brandi Wilcox,

Time: Wednesday, October 21, 6-8 pm
Location: The IMD Co-Design Lab (aka Flower Street Lab)
School of Cinematic Arts
Digital Collaboratory Annex
501 29th Street

Please join us at the IMD seminar this week for presentations and demonstrations by the IMD 3rd year Thesis students. The students will present for the 1st hour, and then run simultaneous demos during the second hour. Professor Mark Bolas will serve as facilitator for the evening.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)