Hey all,
When I started up my new blog I said I would continue to post here, and I totally didn’t.  So I’m going to go ahead and plug my blog: http://defiantlydigital.com/

I’ve had a lot to say recently.

Hey everyone,

Check out this piece I did on what I learned from The White Stripes.

Lessons From The White Stripes

Thanks,

Sam

Hey everyone, Today I am launching my new website, Defiantly Digital . I want to be able to write a lot more without clogging up the recent posts section of the IMD site, and above all else it is time for me to get my own website.  I will definitely still use this blog though, so you [...]

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Hey guys,

I wanted to share one of my favorite projects that I worked on in Game Design Workshop this semester. This one’s a board game called Cop Block that’s played entirely with Legos.  If you have the right Lego pieces laying around (as game designers, you probably do), try it out!

Just a few months and blog entries ago, when I began my internship at IndieCade, I asked, “What are the advantages and disadvantages of entering an agreement with a publisher, and what factors are key to maintaining a positive relationship between the two parties?” I did not come across a solid answer, but rather several [...]

Hey everyone, A few weeks ago I made a prototype for my 482 class, and I can’t believe that I have yet to post it on my blog. The prototype is called See, and it is an exploration of violence in interactive entertainment. My inspiration for the prototype came from Brenda Brathwaithe’s IndieCade keynote. One [...]

On October 10, LucasArts’ David Nottingham tweeted: “If you dream of leaving that big company and making your games and are not by this time next year, come to IndieCade and it will change you.” The fourth annual IndieCade festival continued to distinguish itself in its celebration of the spirit of independent game making and the people [...]

If I had to choose one word to describe IndieCade’s culture, I would choose the word energetic. Each and every one of my colleagues is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that this year’s festival is bigger and better than last year’s in every way possible.  I usually see the result of [...]

IndieCade is just one month away, and now the real fun begins!  I was hired as the Social Media intern near the end of the summer, and my primary responsibility thus far has been to build hype for the festival.  If you have been following IndieCade on Twitter and Facebook, then you’ve seen a little [...]

At one of the many memorable lectures I attended last year at USC, Alan Gershenfeld, CEO of E-Line Media, made a statement so bold that it stuck with me ever since. “The best games create a deep desire to learn.” I ponder the validity of this claim with each new game I play, but I have [...]

“Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” When Avatar redefined cinema last December, Jake Sully’s short video logs chronicling his new life on Pandora gave us insight into the profound emotional experience of discovering a new world. You already saw the movie, so you already [...]

As I’m certain most of you know by now, Roger Ebert recently posted an entry in his journal refuting Kellee Santiago’s claims at TEDxUSC that games already are art. Now as game designers, I can imagine that some of you might take issue with that. If you haven’t seen the article, take a look – Video [...]

First off, a huge congratulations to all of the finalists for this year’s USC Advanced Games Contest. Although I have yet to see many of the proposals, the ones I am familiar with are truly excellent and you should all be tremendously proud. I am posting the proposal I submitted, which did not make the [...]

Perspective. That would be the best word I can think of to sum up my experience at GDC. Every day of my life, I live and breathe interactive entertainment, and yet this week marked the first time that everything I knew and loved came together. The entire industry gathered in San Francisco from March 9-13, [...]

Today was the first time I struggled to find a seat in the Norris Theater. The theater seemed overwhelmingly huge last semester during my 190 class, but today it was packed with students, parents, and professors that all shared a common interest with the man on stage. Everyone in the theater loved animation. Yuri Norstein took [...]

Hey everyone, Recently I have been thinking a lot about adaptations in the entertainment industry. An adaptation can mean a lot of different things, but I’m referring to the use of an existing property in a medium outside of its original medium. The most obvious adaptations in the video game industry are licensed based games, which [...]

Hey everyone! So here I am doing something I never thought I would do: blogging. Any new form of communication strikes me as bizarre first and life-changing second. A few months ago I couldn’t see the point of Twitter, and now I couldn’t stop Tweeting to save my life. But that’s another story. I’m going to [...]