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Paradox Shift, a first-person game in development by a bunch of students at the University of Southern California, is a puzzler. Sort of like Portal. Only instead of moving through space, you're moving through time. More »
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The LA Times had a nice industry-focused series of articles earlier this week, and the one that really caught my eye was on the increasingly common 'game degree' of a variety of stripes — as one person quoted in the article noted, games are 'the ultimate interdisciplinary art.' But one problem of (popular) emerging fields is schools that hop on the bandwagon to lure in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students without really having adequate support for getting those students jobs (sounds like a lot of PhD programs I know): More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5068808&view=rss&microfeed=true While at E3, I wandered down to check out the Indiecade offerings (I meant to post my impressions earlier, but they'll be up tomorrow — better late than never). I'd posted earlier about the postmortem of The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom and was happy to get some hands-on time with the game, plus the chance to chat with Matt Korba (lead designer) and Paul Bellezza (producer) about the game and life inside USC's Interactive Media program. More »
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I never liked group projects as an undergrad, and that was just for boring things like presentations — the idea of having my graduate thesis dependent on a whole team of (interdisciplinary) people besides my dissertation committee makes my blood run cold. Matt Korba has an interesting postmortem of his The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, intended to be his graduate thesis for an MFA in Interactive Media Department at USC. Beyond issues that usually crop up in postmortems, Korba takes a look at some of the challenges that come with designing in an academic context: More »
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Ian Bogost has an interesting analysis of a little 'rhythm' game called Hush, a USC Interactive Media student produced number that uses the 1994 Rwandan civil war as a backdrop. The point of the game is to keep your child calm by singing a lullaby — letters that drop slowly down the screen and must be pressed when they're at their brightest on screen — lest the Hutu patrol finds you (the screen cuts to red, leaving little doubt of what happens if you fail). True vignettes are found rarely in gaming, but Bogost thinks that despite the flaws, Hush points to how vignettes could be incorporated successfully into games and gaming culture: More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=357423&view=rss&microfeed=true USC's Tracy Fullerton addresses the snowballing controversy surrounding Slamdance's decisioon to drop Super Columbine Massacre RPG from their list of finalists and announced that the USC Interactive Media Division will no longer be sponsoring the event. More »
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