Scott Fisher

Speaker: Anne Bray, LA Freewaves
Time: Wednesday, March 26, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

HollyWould?
LA Freewaves Executive Director Anne Bray will present a preview of this year's festival and several related projects and opportunities for media art, activism and public media culture. This year's Freewaves festival is titled HollyWould and will be distributed across every screen on Hollywood Boulevard. Since 1989, LA Freewaves has been presenting biennial festivals of film, video and new media art, under the direction of Anne Bray, who founded the concept of LA Freewaves and has administered the festival for two decades. http://www.freewaves.org/

Anne has been working in the field of media arts since the mid 1970s as an administrator, artist and art teacher. As the Freewaves Executive Director, she has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s to the present, exploring innovative venues, curatorial models and distribution strategies ranging from traditional screenings to online distribution to public art venues. In addition to presenting on LA Freewaves, Anne teaches in the IML's Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program and the public art program at Claremont Graduate University.

***Special Bonus Presentation: Proceeding Ann's talk, first year IMD MFA student, Taiyoung RYU will give an encore presentation of his GDC '08 talk on "Game Design based on Micro-transactions in Online Games". ***

Posted by Scott Fisher at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Presenters: 2nd Year MFA students in CTIN 542, 544, 548
Time: Wednesday, March 12, 6pm-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: "Flying Off The Handle - CTIN 542, 544, 548 Second Year MFA Combined One-Week Interactive Design Project, Spring 2008"

Instructors/Jurors: Mark Bolas, Perry Hoberman, Michael Naimark, Peggy Weil

Project Description:
"In the center of the table in front of you is a pile of handles, knobs and pulls. These objects, specifically shaped for the human hand, can be attached to other objects or surfaces, allowing them to be pushed, pulled, grabbed, closed, opened, turned, twisted, switched, lifted, shifted, operated, poured, tossed, etc. Handles can be attached to either movable and immobile objects. Handles can have both symbolic and/or practical functions - a handle is a kind of affordance. Affordances provide clues to how an object can or should be used (clues that can be useful, but also misleading). Your assignment is to conceive of, design, and produce an interactive experience in which the operation of one or more of these handles by a human user is a central component. This experience should be one or more of the following: surprising, shocking, bewildering, addictive, amazing, exquisite, subtle, provocative."

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaker: Richard Lemarchand, Game Designer, Naughty Dog
Time: Wednesday, March 5, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: "Audacious Feats of Daring: An Expanded Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Post-Mortem"

Brace yourself for a rollicking ride as Naughty Dog game designer Richard Lemarchand leads a collaborative presentation deconstructing the successes and pitfalls of his studio’s first PlayStation 3 release, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. A contemporary reinvention of classic pulp adventure, the game was released at the end of 2007 to wide critical acclaim, public w00ts and the massive salez0rs.

In an Easter egg and bonus content-laden reprise of his GDC 2008 talk, Lemarchand covers the open, meritocratic, intensively collaborative way that Naughty Dog works, the iterative, play-test oriented development methodology that the studio subscribes to, and the technological, design and production challenges that the project faced.

Subjects ripe for discussion in this uniquely interjectional seminar format include interactivity design as exploration, managing large, talented teams through creative chaos, player attention as it relates to immersion, flow and variably scheduled activities, interactive storytelling techniques and emotion in games, wide-linear versus open-world gameplay, and gaming as mass entertainment, literature and fine art. The takeaway promises to be both practically applicable for game developers and stimulating for thinkers about interactive media.

Bio: Richard Lemarchand has made story-based character-action games the main focus of his design career, and has worked with some of the industry’s best and brightest in the field along the way. He spends his days building games with his metaphorical sleeves rolled up, advocating for the player and helping keep the development team on track. His credits include the Gex and Soul Reaver series of games, Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing, and he was most recently the Lead Game Designer for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. He’s a contributor to Game Developer Magazine, and a frequent visitor to USC.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)