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Hit List Q&A: Jesse Schell, Schell Games CEO
In the "Hit List" from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, the video game industry's top talents describe their current gaming addictions, their most anticipated releases and more. This week: Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell. A note from the AIAS:Jesse is the CEO of Schell Games, the largest videogame studio in Pennsylvania. He also serves as Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Jesse has worked on a wide variety of innovative game and simulation projects for both entertainment and education, but he is best known for his award winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses and for Beyond Facebook, a talk at the 2010 DICE Summit where he described a future where games and life become indistinguishable. He is a former chair of the International Game Developers Association, and in 2004 he was named one of the world's Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT Technology Review. Before starting his own company, Jesse was the Creative Director of the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, which helped to develop interactive theme park attractions as well as Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for children. Before that, he worked as writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer's Mime Circus and the Juggler's Guild.Jesse will be speaking at the 2013 D.I.C.E. Summit on "The Secret Mechanisms." The world of game design is changing. New systems of distribution and payment are making even seasoned designers feel naïve. The key to understanding what business models and what game concepts will work is to understand the human mind, for the mind is the medium in which game designers work. Far from an inert surface, the human mind has thousands of complex mechanisms that determine a game's success or failure. Continuing the theme of Jesse's landmark 2010 DICE talk, this talk gathers mechanisms from far and wide: art, psychology, advertising, music, architecture, poetry, science, storytelling – nothing is off-limits, and special attention is paid to the mechanisms that can help us understand how to live, thrive, and survive in this post-retail world of game development.
MMO Family: Six kid-friendly MMOs that need to be made
Back in 2010 at DICE, game developer and Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell gave a thought-provoking talk about extrinsic motivations in games. In it, he postulated that there's a blurring of the lines, and that we're moving toward a day when our everyday actions are driven by "points" and "achievements." All too often, that's what drives gameplay in popular MMOs, particularly for children -- complete some minigames or tasks in order to accumulate points/tokens/currency that can be used for rewards of your choice. But sometimes, what gets lost is the fun of playing in a virtual world. When my son plays Wizard101, one of his favorite things to do is stopping by the hidden cave under the waterfall in Wizard City because he was so excited to have discovered it on his own. And when my kids found the vault in Free Realms, it was one of their biggest moments. Granted, the vault is closed now and partially hidden by vines, but they were still excited to have found it. There's so much more to MMOs than achievements and points, and there are many popular children's titles that would be great settings. Some foster exploration, some teach, and some are just wonderful venues for kids to have fun. Read on for a look at what children's MMOs need to be made (and I promise that not one is Harry Potter!).
Five MMOs that have gone MIA
Unlike Chuck Norris, who seems to hang on as an MMO meme with insane tenacity (perhaps it's that extra fist under his beard), there are a handful of MMOs that appear to have dropped off the radar in the last several months -- if not years. Admittedly, this was originally to be a top 10 list of missing MMOs, but in the last half of this year, several developers have seen fit to thwart our plans by actually releasing information about their games. Shock! Horror! Nevertheless, I've armed myself with an enormous cup of coffee and plundered the archives of Massively and general press releases for MMOGs that seem to have dropped off the radar. Are they still under development? Will we see some movement on them in 2011? Will it take a Chuck Norris-level feat-of-strength and all-around badassery to pull them back from the developmental abyss they appear to be in? Join me behind the break as I run down some of the MMOs we're still waiting for word on.
