Chris Swain: Creating Video Games With Greater Emotional Experiences

July 18, 2007

Co-founder and director of the EA Game Innovation Lab, Chris Swain is a game designer, entrepreneur, and co-author of the textbook Game Design Workshop. He teaches courses on game design, interactive design, and the business of interactive media for USC at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Prior to joining USC, Swain was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive, where he led over 150 interactive products for clients that include Microsoft, Sony, Disney, Activision, America Online, Warner Brothers, PBS, Intel, IBM, Kodak, Ticketmaster, Children's Television Workshop, and many others.

Swain was also a co-founder of the technology start-up Spiderdance, Inc. He served on the Board of Directors of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Emmy's) from 2000-2004. He started his career at the pioneering interactive firm Synapse Technologies.

Tell us a little bit about your work.

I co-direct the EA Game Innovation Lab at US. The purpose of the lab is to explore new uses of games and interactive media. It's clear that games make powerful connections with people however the uses are traditionally for entertainment and for very narrow, action-oriented kinds of play experiences. My colleague, Tracy Fullerton, and I are working to broaden conventional wisdom about what games are and can be.

What drives you to continue advancing this program?

I'm fascinated by system design and the idea that simple rules beget complex behavior. As a game designer, you craft some rules and then players behave within those rules and have engaging experiences. Some games create very intense visceral experiences, some create deep thinking experiences, some create silly, light experiences. I'd like to see games that create deeper emotional experiences as well.

Players bring their own personalities to the play experiences. You can think about this realm of design in a high-minded sense, and draw analogies with law and policy and how they affect "player" behavior in society. Or you can think about it in a down-to-earth sense and just think about how to craft a fun time for people. In any case, playable systems and game design have little academic grounding to date. So I hope my research projects and scholarly writing at USC will help define game design this as a field.

How might your work in game design and innovation impact people's lives, now and in the future?

Again, I'll answer with a high-minded example and a practical example.

On the high-minded side: Games are powerful learning devices that provide instant feedback and sophisticated reward structures. Games let us learn by doing, which is one of the most powerful ways of learning, according to the research. People especially kids are learning machines by nature. We have instincts built into our operating systems to learn about the world through play. Learning is pleasurable to us and games are some of the most engaging learning devices. Can we create games that help people learn even more effectively? Can those games teach us more than the limited things we learn from today's commercial entertainment games? I think the answer is yes, and hopefully my lab will help prove that.

As a way of supporting what I just said: Research shows that IQ scores have been steadily rising in developing nations. That's a fact. The one factor that is attributable to this rise is a societal increase in exposure to cognitively challenging tasks. Exposure to computer interfaces and games are one of the strongest factors here. Combine that with the fact that young people today spend more time with games than with television or any other media and it builds an argument that games already have a powerful societal impact.

On the practical side: We just released a game from the lab called The Redistricting Game. It was a cross-disciplinary effort that included faculty from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communications, and Gould School of Law. It was funded by the USC Annenberg Center for Communications.

The purpose of the game is to educate people about the problems associated with congressional redistricting and empower them to take civic action. The game is consciously non-partisan and the player can play as either political party. In the game, the player works within the real rules of redistricting used in most U.S. states. The player gains intimate experience with drawing district maps and dealing with strong-headed party bosses, politicians, activists, and the courts. In Mission 5 we switch and use the rules/laws in Representative John Tanner's Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act (H.R. 543). So, after playing different missions the player can see how the system works today and how it would work under specific reform laws. There is a forum where people can debate the issue and a button where they can send a letter directly to their real congressional rep.

We showed the game to Rep. Tanner (D-TN-8) in Washington and he loved it! Tanner hosted us at the U.S. Capitol Building in June and we formally launched the game to the press along with a collection of Democrats, Republicans, and leaders from the reform community. The game has generated over 100 news articles including great stories from CNN, NPR, Washington Post, NY Times, USA Today, Wired.com, and many other places. Check it out at http://www.redistrictinggame.org

The point here is that we explored an important and hard to explain social issue with a game. People get deeply engaged in it because they experience for themselves. We hope that the game can help drive public discourse about the issue and help affect positive change.

How did you come up with the idea for The Redistricting Game?

Well, in the case of The Redistricting Game, the exec director of the USC Annenberg Center for Communications, Professor Jonathan Aronson came to me and Professor Doug Thomas and said he wanted to explore redistricting somehow. He asked us to pitch him something and came back with a treatment for The Redistricting Game.

Response has been phenomenal and I see the game as a model for how to explore other tricky social issues. Right now I am working on funding a game about campaign finance reform.

Has anyone ever doubted that your idea could work?

Ha! People have been skeptical of games in academia for so long that I just assume everyone will doubt me. That is recently changing though. For instance, it was very rewarding when we went to Washington this summer with The Redistricting Game and were welcomed with enthusiasm in the House of Representatives, think tanks, advocacy group offices, and by all kinds of reporters. As I was flying back with pockets full of business cards I had to wonder if games have finally arrived or just that redistricting is a particularly good application for games. I think it's a bit of both.

What is the next step in the innovation process for you (and how might people help)?

We are building credibility for the ideas I mentioned above step by step. Games are interesting because they fit together with all kinds of other research. Imagine: games plus politics, immunology, economics, leadership studies, management, intelligence analysis, art. We've put together funding and cross-disciplinary teams for all of those examples in our lab already and we are just getting started. I'm excited to meet more people in the USC research community and see how this kind of research can grow. USC is already the leader in this space and we have opportunity to really take off.

What is the one innovation you can't live without?

Adobe Photoshop I use it to visualize the concepts we talk about in the lab. Our medium is inherently visual so we work hard to translate written and verbal concepts into visualizations and easy-to-understand interfaces.

What would people be surprised to learn about you?

I play games every day. I do it in the way that many people read the paper.

What do you wish you would have invented?

With this question I like to think about contemporary inventions that made me slap my forehead: Among games: The Sims, Guitar Hero, ClubPenguin.com, Kongregate.com, Nintendo Wii Outside of games: Wikipedia.com, LinkedIn.com, Del.icio.us, the flashdrive, Google SMS

Any tips for aspiring innovators?

1) Embrace iterative design. Short cycles of prototyping and iteration are more powerful than long cycles.

2) Embrace your user. In the game lab we employ a technique called playcentric design which means the player is at the heart of the process and we continuously test on our target player. Replace the word "player" with "user" and you have a core concept for innovation in fields beyond game design.

3) Understand that the way you present an idea is as important as the idea itself.

4) If you get stuck on a design problem give it a little space and go relax. Your brain will churn on the problem in the background and bring an answer back to you when you least expect it. That's why you get great ideas in the shower and while driving. If you know this about your brain your life - as someone under pressure to innovate - will be more enjoyable.

Email or phone?

Definitely email.

Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Socrates or Newton? Other? Why?

I'm inspired by innovators from the past and driven by innovators from the present. Everyone is a product of the time they live in and it's interesting to see what surprising things pop out from people who are walking around in the same zeitgeist that I am. A contemporary innovator that impresses me is Tim Berners-Lee. I am watching closely to see what he comes up with in his work on the semantic web.

What is the most fun you've ever had?

I spent a couple of undergrad summers as a dock porter on Mackinac Island in Michigan. Mackinac is a place that tries to remain in the past. No automobiles are allowed on the island only horses and bicycles. The dock porters are college students. We'd construct precariously tall loads of luggage on the baskets of our Schwinn Heavy Duty bicycles with the help of bungee cords. The loads were routinely higher than our heads while standing on the pedals and very heavy. Then we'd cruise down the street in a kind of primate-style display of strength, balance, and daring. I'd haul many thousands of pounds of luggage like this each day up and down hills, on and off boats, through rainstorms, etc and then chase girls all night. It was a life affirming time.