Tag Archives: games

Speakers: Tim LeTourneau, Erin Reynolds, & Joe Unger
Time:             Wednesday, March 13, 6-8pm
Location:     USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Tim LeTourneau, Chief Creative Officer
A 20 year veteran of Electronic Arts, Tim spent 13 years at Maxis. He worked as a producer on SimCity 3000 and the original version of The Sims. He then produced several of The Sims expansion packs, The Sims 2, and created MySims, eventually becoming GM of The Sims Studio. He joined Zynga in early 2011, and after launching FarmVille 2 was elevated to the CCO role to further the role of design at Zynga.

Erin Reynolds, Designer
Erin Reynolds is currently a Game Designer on the Poker Team at Zynga. She graduated from USC with a BA in Fine Arts in 2006 and, recently, from USC again with an MFA in Interactive Media in 2012. Having diverse experience in working on games for the past 10 years (publishing, development, academic, indie, and now social and mobile) she is passionate about and confident in the potential games have to empower, educate, and inspire players of all kinds and make the world a better, more playful place.

Joe Unger, Sr Game Designer
Joe Unger is a recent addition to the Zynga Design team and is currently leading Coasterville. With 15 years of experience he has worked across the scope of game development. Beginning as a writer on Pen & Paper RPGs and board games, Unger has developed games and design teams across PC, Console, Social and Mobile. Most recently he has lead the teams behind Sony’s Sorcery and 2K’s Borderlands 2 DLC: Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage

Speaker:     Brent Bushnell,  Two Bit Circus and Anti-AgingGames.com
Time:           Wednesday, January 30, 6-8pm
Location:    USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Brent Bushnell is an engineer and entrepreneur. He has extensive software engineering and systems experience including deep knowledge of web application authoring, scaling, and maintenance. He has held executive positions with entertainment & technology startups for the past 10 years, co-founding Syyn Labs, uWink and Tapcode. Brent attended the University of California, Los Angeles for Computer Science and serves as a technical advisor to three companies.

Two Bit Circus is a unique hybrid of intellectuals, creatives and performers. We like to get our hands dirty. By combining engineering, fabrication, and construction, we leap beyond the digital screen and into the real world, creating physical marvels fueled by technology and perfected by craftsmanship. As natural story-tellers, we use ideation, programming, and design to establish strong creative and technical foundations for every project.

Anti-AgingGames.com features fun and easy memory, focus, and relaxation games designed by Nolan Bushnell, the Founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, and a team of expert neurobehavioral scientists. Anti-AgingGames.com is the only brain stimulation game site optimized for cognitively healthy people over 35 years of age and includes tips that teach how to potentially reduce the risk of early memory loss through lifestyle changes. These tips were distilled from over 17,000 medical studies.

Speaker:    Yasser Malaika, Valve
Time:          Wednesday, September 26, 6-8pm
Location:   USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122 (ZML)

Interaction Designer/Developer/Artist.   Yasser enjoys working at the intersection of architecture and digital technology.  At Valve, he has created environments, effects, and production tools for games in the Half Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal series. He has also developed powerful creativity software that is easy to learn and fun to use, such as the Portal 2 Puzzle Maker.  Before joining Valve, Yasser helped to design SketchUp, a widely used 3D modeling tool, and developed a low-cost, multi-material digital fabrication system. He has also had a career in architecture, where he used games such as Unreal Tournament to visualize designs of stadiums, office buildings, and classrooms. While studying architecture, he used games such as Quake to experience long-lost ancient buildings, floating sea colonies, and to recreate never-built designs of the architects he admired.

Speaker:     Chris DeWolfe,  co-founder and former CEO of MySpace
Time:           Wednesday, April 25 , 6-8pm
Location: USC School of Cinematic Arts, The Albert and Dana Broccoli Theater: Room SCA 112    [ PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION]

Digital entrepreneur Chris DeWolfe is best known as co-founder and former CEO of MySpace from 2003 to 2009, the social network that redefined the concept of socializing around shared interests. Under DeWolfe’s leadership, MySpace grew exponentially. At launch in 2003, MySpace attracted an average of 300,000 new members daily, and when he left the company in 2009, it had more than 125 million monthly active users globally.

DeWolfe continues his entrepreneurial mission at SGN. As CEO, DeWolfe led the acquisitions and rollup of MindJolt, SGN and HallPass Media, creating a leading independent multiplatform game developer and publisher. Responsible for more than 12 top 10 titles on the iTunes Store and three number one titles on the Amazon Appstore, SGN has 35 million monthly active users, 45 million mobile downloads and more than 80 million installs on Facebook.

DeWolfe has been featured on the cover of Fortune magazine twice, was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world (2007), and chosen by Barbara Walters as one of her 10 most fascinating people (2007). DeWolfe has a B.A. degree in Finance from the University of Washington and an MBA from the University of Southern California and was honored by the latter as Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year (2006). DeWolfe served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; he lives in Los Angeles.

(photo from joystiq)

Speaker:    Christina Norman, Riot Games
Time:          Wednesday, April 11 , 6-8pm
Location:   USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Christina Norman is a Lead Designer at Riot Games currently working on League of Legends. She previously worked at BioWare on Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 in both Lead Programmer and Lead Designer roles. Christina was instrumental in creating Mass Effect’s cinematic conversation system, and building the real time shooter gameplay of Mass Effect 2 & 3, as well as Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer.

In her talk, Christina will discuss the evolution of design in Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3. Specific design choices, and the thought process behind them, will be discussed in detail

My takeaways from GDC 2012 (and a little bit of SxSW).

Sid Meier is a man for whom I have the utmost respect as a game designer, and when I saw that he had a talk on “Interesting Decisions” on the first day of the Main Conference during GDC, I felt not only a desire, but a strong obligation to attend. But something struck me during his talk: the language he was using to describe games felt somewhat antiquated. All content aside, he was characterizing his games and players as “awesome”, “epic”, “bad-ass”, and he was trying to get designers to think along these parallel lines using the aforementioned ‘interesting decisions.’

What it indicated, and why I felt it strange, was a highly insulary and limited usage of language within game-spaces. Without an expanded vocabulary, how are games able to truly grow as a medium? And it seems I wasn’t the only person at GDC with this in mind. Development, both externally and internally, surrounding the culture of language and games was my largest takeaway at GDC 2012. It’s this movement which is beginning to chip away at the social stigma of games and help propel it as a leading cultural pillar of the current century. (more…)

Speaker:     Rick Thompson, Investor and Entrepreneur
Time:           Wednesday, February 29 , 6-8pm
Location: USC School of Cinematic Arts, Fanny Brice Theatre: Room SCA 110    [ PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION]

Rick Thompson is the most active investor in social and mobile gaming, with a portfolio that includes Cie Studios, Funzio, Idle Games, Iddiction, Red Robot, Rumble Entertainment and Wild Needle.

Previously Rick co-founded Playdom (acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2010), Adify (acquired by Cox in 2008) and Flycast (IPO in 1999 and acquired by CMGI in 2000).  Rick was part of the founding team of Octel (IPO in 1987 and sold to Lucent in 1997).   Rick received an AB from UC, Santa Cruz and an MBA from the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker: Howard Marks
Time:      Wednesday, February 1 , 6-8pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Howard Marks is Co-Chair of Start Engine and CEO of Gamzee.  Howard is an incredibly successful technology entrepreneur that has worked with a number of companies specializing in the video game, online gaming, social gaming and internet education industry. He is also working as the CEO of Gamzee, a company he founded in April 2011 with the stated goal of disrupting the gaming industry by making games that anyone can play anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

In 2005, Howard founded Acclaim Games. After its acquisition by Playdom, he became head of the Acclaim studio and Sr. VP, Strategic Planning at Disney Interactive Media Group.

Howard got his start in 1983 while a student at the University of Michigan.  In 1991 as a co-founder, member of the board of directors and Executive Vice-President of Activision, Howard helped turn a brand that was largely viewed as dead into the leading powerhouse of the video game industry.

Speaker:       Jeff Watson

Time:              Wednesday, January 18 , 6-8pm
Location:       USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122

Jeff Watson is a PhD candidate in Media arts and Practice at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He has a professional background in screenwriting, filmmaking and experience design. His academic resume includes a BA in Cultural Studies from McGill University, an MFA in Film and Video from York University and a residency at the Canadian Film Centre. His research focuses on investigating how mobile and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and participation.

For tonight’s IMD Forum, Jeff will discuss the design process and challenges in developing SCA’s Reality, the hugely successful collaborative production game recently written up in Wired, .