Tracy Fullerton

Sustainable Play Toward a New Games Movement for the Digital Age

This article suggests a revisit of the New Games movement, formed by Stewart Brand and others in the early 1970s in the United States as a response to the Vietnam War, against a backdrop of dramatic social and economic change fueled by a looming energy crisis, civil rights, feminism, and unhealthy widespread drug abuse. Like-minded contemporaries R. Buckminster Fuller (World Game), Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), and Christo and Jean-Claude (Valley Curtain) responded in kind to these environmental and sociopolitical quandaries with their “earthworks.” As digital game designers and theorists embark on developing new methods to address the creative crisis in mainstream game production, against a similar backdrop of global climate change, a controversial war, political upheaval, and complex gender issues, the authors propose a reexamination of the New Games movement and its methods as a means of constructing shared contexts for meaningful play in virtual and real-world spaces.

Game Design Workshop : A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Fourth Edition

The Role of the Game Designer. The Structure of Games. Working with Formal Elements. Working with Dramatic Elements. Working with System Dynamics. Conceptualization. Prototyping. Digital Prototyping. Playtesting. Functionality, Completeness, and Balance. Fun and Accessibility. Team Structures. Stages of Development. The Design Document. Understanding the Game Industry. Selling Yourself and Your Ideas to the Game Industry.

Play-centric games education

Major universities around the world now offer degree programs in game design in response to student demand; more than 80 such programs exist in North America alone. Recognizing the overwhelming interest in guidelines for teaching game design, the International Game Developers Association established a committee to help educators craft a curriculum that reflects the real-world creative process of professional game designers. The interactive media program at the USC School of Cinema-Television combines a broad liberal arts education with the technical expertise needed to create games that provide players with a narratively rich and emotionally immersive experience

Designing history: the path to participation nation

This paper describes the iterative design process of a cross media learning environment for high school students, the heart of which is an online collectible card game centered on U.S. Constitutional issues. The method of design and iterative process undertaken by the several media, industry, technology, curriculum and content partners associated with this project is described in detail by the core game design team from the USC School of Cinematic Arts Game Innovation Lab and Activision Blizzard. The project goals were to design a game that encourages historical thinking and learning through its core mechanics and which aligns with standards for middle and high school history courses. The progress of the design against these goals is described in terms of a detailed iterative process and measured with preliminary evaluation and testing results.

Journey of discovery: the night journey project as "video/game art"

This paper describes the development of a video/game art project being produced by media artist Bill Viola in collaboration with a team from the USC Game Innovation Lab, which uses a combination of both video and game technologies to explore the universal experience of an individuals journey towards enlightenment. Here, we discuss both the creative and technical approaches to achieving the projects goals of evoking in the player the sense of undertaking a spiritual journey.