IMD Forum for 1/21/09: Chris Swain
Speaker: Chris Swain, Interactive Media Division, School of Cinematic Arts.
Time: Wednesday, January 21, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
Title: Future of Games"
Bio: Chris Swain is a game designer, educator, and co-author of the textbook Game Design Workshop. He co-founded the EA Game Innovation Lab at USC. His serious game lab projects include:
• The Redistricting Game—funded by the USC Annenberg Center for Communication
• Immune Attack—funded by National Science Foundation and created in collaboration with Brown University and the Federation of
American Scientists.
• ELECT-BiLat and ELECT urbanSIM—funded by the U.S. Army and produced for the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
• The New New Deal—funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and produced in collaboration with the Los Angeles Times.
Prior to coming to USC, Swain worked on games for Microsoft, Sony, Disney, Activision, Acclaim, and many others. He was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive. At R/GA he led over 150 projects for clients that included AOL, Warner Brothers, PBS, Intel, Children’s Television Workshop, and many others. He was a creator of NetWits—a massively multiplayer online game show—for the Microsoft Network. Other notable projects include Multiplayer Wheel of Fortune and Multiplayer Jeopardy! for Sony Online, and Weakest Link Interactive for NBC.
Swain was a founding member of the start-up Spiderdance, Inc. He served on the Board of Directors of the Emmy’s from 2000-2004. His work has received many awards including Time magazine’s Best of the Web. He started his career at the pioneering interactive firm Synapse Technologies.