Joshua+McVeigh,+Andy+Uehara,+Casey+China+Michael+Annetta


 * CS33. Joshua McVeigh, Andy Uehara, Casey China & Michael Annetta ** –//Teaching Creativity and Meaningful Play through Game Design//

May 27 Friday 9:00-9:45 PM HM 150

We will engage the audience as co-participants in an interactive workshop where we explore the methodology of game design by critically examining the mechanics of canonical games. Participants will play, tweak, and remix vital components of familiar board games in order to understand their interactive systems and reflect on the relationship between design and meaningful play.

Affiliation/Bio: University of Southern California (Interactive Media Division MFA program and Media Arts and Practice PhD program within the School of Cinematic Arts), grad student, info@elephantintherelationship.com. Joshua McVeigh-Schultz is an artist, designer, and scholar. His work reimagines the performative affordances of everyday rituals. He completed an MA in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and an MFA at UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media program. For his MFA thesis project he designed a crowdsourced interview tool (Synaptic Crowd) that enables online participants to conduct collaborative on-the-street interviews without having to be on the street. He is currently earning a PhD in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California. He also works as a researcher for the Institute for Multimedia Literacy’s HYPERLINK "http://k12media.usc.edu/" Teaching with Digital Media professional development program (helping K12 instructors to introduce multimedia tools and design-based learning into the classroom). He is a member of Henry Jenkins’s HYPERLINK "http://sites.google.com/site/participatorydemocracyproject/" Civic Paths research group, studying new models of political engagement at the intersection of civics and pop-culture, and a designer in Scott Fisher’s HYPERLINK "http://mobilemedia.usc.edu/" Mobile and Environmental Research Lab, where he develops speculative interactive experiences for built environments and vehicles of the future. Recent work includes Please Call Me, an interactive installation that solicits calls and delivers playful instructions through a surveilled phone. He also co-designed an alternative reality game called Dendritix where players, communicating over mobile phones, work to uncover elusive interdimensional gnomes by exploring a networked (text-based) virtual world, as they navigate physical space looking for clues. Co-presenter: Andy Uehara is a graduate student in the Interactive Media program at the University of Southern California. In the past, Andy threw grenades and screamed obscenities in the United States Marine Corps. Andy is interested in the intersection of play, education, and technology. He is the co-creator of the Combiform gaming platform (HYPERLINK "http://www.facebook.com/Combiform" www.facebook.com/Combiform). Combiform uses custom game controllers that are designed to break down the invisible wall between players interacting together. Andy also co-developed Combiform Shooter, a game built on the Combiform platform, which was a semi-finalist at the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards. Combiform Shooter is a shoot’em up that allows players to experience their fantasy as the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Recently Andy designed another game for the Combiform platform, Bisho Bisho Bailout, which won the Most Innovative Game award and was runner-up for the Best in Show award at the 2010 Meaningful Play Conference. In Bisho Bisho Bailout, players must cooperate to fight the rising tide by physically combining their controllers and jointly directing the movement and actions of their characters. Co-presenter: Casey China is a public health professional with interest in the potential for games to improve individual and population health, including the physical, psychological and social environment factors that impact health and wellbeing. Her previous work includes Health Detective, a game introducing students to field epidemiology and the steps of disease outbreak investigation, for which she was co-creator, including game design, artist, and public health advisor. She was level designer for Fox Sokoban, a multi-player clone of the Sokoban puzzle game, and game artist for Japanese Numbers Banzai!, a program designed to teach children Japanese numbers through auditory and visual recognition. Casey graduated from Brown University with a BA in Psychology and completed her Master of Public Health degree at the University of Washington. Co-presenter: Michael Annetta is a cross-media artist with a background in theatre, film and television, as an actor, singer, director, producer, and art director. He holds a BA from Penn State University in Film, with Honors in Theatre, and has completed the classical actor’s training program at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York City. As an MFA candidate in the Interactive Media program of the University of Southern California, his current research extends beyond the conventional definition of video gaming to include work in the emerging fields of serious/educational gaming, public interactives and responsive environments, interactive data visualization, alternate reality games and other real-world experience design. He is a designer in Scott Fisher’s HYPERLINK "http://mobilemedia.usc.edu/" Mobile and Environmental Research Lab. Examples of his recent work include last year’s USC MFA Interactive Media Division Thesis showcase (Singularities, Producer), a storytelling game (Rain of the Gods), an educational math game (Zooples in Space!), and an interactive morality and ethics exploration (Puddinheads).