GAME WIZARDS Anthony Borquez, Vincent Diamante and Tim Langdell, all of the USC Viterbi School, are breaking open the frontiers of interactive gaming. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Issue: Summer 2005

Game Plan

They are often slammed as the root of all social evil, so why are videogames the hottest thing in academe? Because, say experts, they’re also the key to an avalanche of 21st-century innovations. Best of all, it’s a field USC is poised to dominate.

By Eric Mankin

Bathed in a strange light, the familiar architecture of USC’s Von KleinSmid Center flickers from the computer screen, accurate in every detail, lovingly rendered in 3D. Using joystick controls, Anthony Borquez moves through the landscape. He enters, walks down a corridor past classroom doors, past the soda machines.

Outside, the campus looks strange. A flat plain stretches to the horizon in most directions. But the ornate façade of Doheny Memorial Library rises to the east; to the west, the bronze statue of Tommy Trojan stands.

“If you break off Tommy’s arm, you can get some more weapons,” Borquez tells the 60 students filling a large Kaprielian Hall classroom to capacity.

It’s soon clear why weapons are needed. Through the columns of the VKC arcade, two creatures unlike any faculty, staff or students you’ve ever seen (they’re flat-headed, olive-colored robots with green eye slits) advance, machine guns blazing.

Borquez fires back, destroying the pair. But more adversaries – these are horned demons with white eyes and prominent fangs in their lower jaws – approach from behind VKC’s signature tower. They quickly extinguish Borquez’s remaining lives, freeing the USC researcher to continue his lecture on game design (and leaving virtual-VKC in malevolent hands).

Borquez (’94, MS ’98, EdD ’04), who directs the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Technology Program, built the VKC environment on top of “Unreal Tournament.” That popular game lets advanced players construct new worlds for its stock characters.

The symbolism behind combining a hit game and USC facilities is striking. Games (or, in more academic terms, “interactive media”) are making a bid to become a defining force in the 21st century – as important, some say, as film and television were in the 20th. And thanks to a confluence of strategy, geography and exceptional talent, USC is primed to become the dominant academic center for the teaching, study and advancement of games.

Trojan graduates already flow by substantial numbers into the booming games business. One can only speculate on the rewards of academic domination of an industry that took in $9.1 billion in software and hardware sales last year. And that’s just the first volley. The game envelope is exploding: millions more people inhabit this space every year, by ones, twos and threes in video arcades and at home playstations; by hundreds and thousands on mass-participation Internet sites.

The technology is fast spilling over the boundaries of mere entertainment. A group of USC researchers has adapted the same framework that put monsters in VKC to a game that teaches soldiers the basics of Iraqi language and culture. Beefed up with artificial intelligence, similar systems have the potential to change education at every level from kindergarten to graduate school. Imagine the VKC game populated not by horned demons and killer robots but by complex, conflicted, manipulative personalities who learn, adapt and even deceive.

Another game developed at USC blurs the line between fantasy and reality, turning the physical campus into virtual playspace. Gamers with hand-held devices now wander the university’s gardens and quads planting and uprooting cyber flowers and crystals visible only to themselves and other players.

Naturally, a cadre of USC social scientists – mass media scholars, culture critics and sociologists – is closely monitoring these developments, studying their meanings and possible societal impacts.


In a Classroom of the Johnny Carson Television Center, students gather for the first meeting of CTIN 489, “Intermediate Game Design Workshop,” taught by Chris Swain and Peter Brinson. The room is packed with computer gaming gear and intense young faces – faces not much younger than those of the instructors.

Swain, co-author of one of the first textbooks in the field, already knows most of the 19 students. He snaps digital pictures of three newcomers to jog his memory.

He probably needn’t have bothered: they would soon know each other very well. A couple of weeks into the semester, he and his students met at LAX and boarded a plane for Redwood City, Calif. – headquarters of Maxis, a subsidiary of games industry giant Electronic Arts.

Maxis is the home of “The Sims,” a game phenomenon in which players take care of doll-like characters whose specific desires – for food, cleanliness, social interaction – are displayed and quantified on screen dials. Sims can satisfy their desires by interacting with objects – exercise equipment, showers, refrigerators and so forth – in their virtual environment. They can have pets, go on vacation, fall in love, and, coming soon, attend college. Some 52 million copies of “The Sims” are in circulation, making this the biggest single franchise in gamedom.

Swain’s class spends a weekend in intensive meetings with Sims gamemasters. They spend the rest of the semester designing objects and, if all goes well, a new environment for Sims to exist in – a virtual university.

To permit the work, each student has been given a flashcard containing the highly proprietary Edith, the top-secret Sim-building tool.

BING GORDON Electronic Arts’ chief creative officer, he is the initial holder of the first endowed chair in electronic gaming and interactive entertainment at a university. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Many USC alumni will not recall courses including company-paid trips, hotel stays and intensive contact with commercial project teams. EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon admits it is generous. But, he says, he wants the project to have every chance of success.

“We are investing money, people, energy; we are trying to do everything we can to help,” he says. Support for Swain’s workshop is part of a multi-million dollar investment EA has made in the USC School of Cinema-Television. The company also established an interactive entertainment program to support the film school’s MFA in game design, and has endowed a new rotating faculty chair, which brings leaders in electronic gaming to the film school for two-year terms. Gordon himself is the chair’s first holder.

As part of this program, EA fosters a series of interactive encounters between company personnel and USC students – a series that brought Gordon to campus in January. “If you’re in the game business and don’t have a hit game, you’re out of business,” he tells the audience of USC game students in Bing Theater. Dressed in a black velour sweat shirt, jeans and running shoes, Gordon leans casually into the podium. His big, buff presence and slow, casual manner are strangely at odds with the intensely competitive world he describes.

The way to build hit games, he says, is by recruiting talent. And the place to do that, he implies, is right here.

“USC is the best at what it does in film,” Gordon explains. “The film school strongly believes in team building and project-based skills, with great exposure to specialists in the industry.”

TRACY FULLERTON A graduate of USC’s film production program and now a member of the faculty, she has spent the last decade on the outer technological edge. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

To see what EA executives so admire about the USC film school, visit the classroom of Tracy Fullerton MFA ’91. A graduate of the film production program, she has spent the last decade on the outer technological edge. Among her many ahead-of-their-time projects is the film Ride for Life. Produced for experimental theaters, the multiple-outcome movie lets spectators influence the plot by pressing buttons at crucial story points. Fullerton also developed play-along-at-home companions to the popular game shows “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” – precursors to the new generation of computer home participation elements now enhancing TV shows like “Crossing Jordan.” And she’s worked on many video games, of course.

The most important concept she teaches – one at the heart of all game production – is interactive design. The electronic game, perhaps even more than film, is a collaborative medium. “It is so rare that one person designs a game,” Fullerton says. No single individual can possibly generate all the elements – design, art, story, computer coding, action – that make up a video game. Nor would they want to try.

As Fullerton explains in Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping and Playtesting Games (2004), the seminal textbook she co-authored with Swain, game development happens in a continuing creative spiral: create, playtest; revise, playtest; revise again, playtest. Each new feature is checked against the reaction of users – ideally, people outside the creative team. The key, Fullerton tells her students, is to help others fix and improve the product. Indeed, the most important skill her students will gain in the class is knowing how to playtest and be a playtester.

Playtesting – learning to understand and usefully critique games in progress – is as fundamental to game design as film editing is to movies, says the Viterbi School’s Tim Langdell, another longtime USC games expert who was present when interactive-media instruction began here. He and two co-authors recently published the first textbook exclusively devoted to playtesting (Game Testing All in One). “Imagine,” he says excitedly, “being the first person to be writing a book on film editing!”

Playtesting and other game-development activities have dedicated homes at USC. The cinema school recently opened the EA Game Innovation laboratory, where students created “Dyadin” (www.dyadin.com). The 3D action puzzle won a coveted spot at this year’s Independent Games Festival. The engineering school’s newly opened Tutor Hall has space allotted for a gaming center.

Game-development theory and activity flourishes at USC outside the classroom, too. A student club founded by Fullerton and Swain meets regularly. Members engage in interactive experimentation and play, including remote intercollegiate contests. (USC took on Carnegie-Mellon in February; the Trojans lost.)

More formally, Swain leads the USC Game Deconstruction Group, which conducts monthly salons with the region’s leading game professionals. “We choose the hottest digital game on the market and have two students play it all the way through,” says Swain. “The students put on a two-hour presentation that lets the industry guests see and interact with all the innovative features of the game. It’s like the game industry’s version of a private screening.”

Bottom line: USC students have extraordinary exposure to gaming in all forms. And the industry appreciates it.

“Most of our successes have been from USC,” says Shannon Studstill, a director of production at Sony Playstation Studios in Santa Monica. “Every intern that we’ve brought in from USC has a phenomenal work ethic, great attitude. We’ve got guys who are working their tails off, willing to do whatever it takes.”

“I really like Tim’s game proposal class,” echoes John Hight MBA ’04, an executive producer at Atari who has hired several Langdell proteges. “They form a team. They put together a design, rip it apart and refine it. It’s only recently that universities have begun teaching this.”

Eager to get in on the action, several institutions have approached Hight to inquire what students entering the game industry need to know. It takes more than a couple of classes to train a game designer, he tells them: “There are so many aspects: art, software, business.” Only a large research university is likely to have the breadth of disciplines necessary to put together a complete interactive media curriculum. With 29 different gaming courses across several schools and programs already in place, USC is clearly the school to beat.

Meanwhile, the demand for skilled games people is skyrocketing. In his presentation, EA leader Bing Gordon estimated his company will add 1,100 new employees in the near future, including 45 new executive producers, 55 head designers, 10 art directors and 10 design managers.

Remarkable economic forces are driving this industry. A new game costs about $10 million to produce; if it’s a hit, it could generate $300 million in revenues. Compare that to a movie, where the average production costs $50 to $60 million and must earn nearly three times its budget to see a profit.


In October, Langdell teamed with cinema’s interactive media chair Scott Fisher and three other games faculty to convene the USC Games Summit, a two-day event to foster the exchange of ideas and information on videogame and simulation research at the university. Topics ranged from curriculum to cognitive and behavioral research to next-generation hardware and software R&D.

The program addressed gaming from all sides. Presenters came not just from the cinema and engineering schools, with their longstanding and self-evident ties to the discipline, but also from the USC Rossier School of Education, the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Fine Arts, the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, even from the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Media theorists and critics talked about games and popular culture; psychologists and psychiatrists talked about ways to use games to understand how the brain functions; educators discussed new ways to teach and present scholarly material.

Presentations had intriguing titles like “Building Virtual Humans” and “Gestalt Design for Immersive Environments,” or “Examining Violence and Sex in Popular Video Games” and “A Russian History Game for the Masses.”

Researchers working in the USC Viterbi School’s Information Sciences Institute explained how they had employed supercomputers to create a strategy game for the Pentagon that brings to life a whole continent teeming with people, weapons and vehicles. Another ISI group, in collaboration with the interactive Newseum project in Washington, D.C., described a game that allows visitors to experience what it’s like to be a reporter covering a breaking news story. Psychologist Skip Rizzo talked about a game environment to help war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder deal with their experiences. Media theorists discussed ways of characterizing and understanding the rapt play-state called “flow,” in which time is suspended, the player consumed by tasks of a difficulty level in perfect sync with her problem-solving abilities.

Following the presentation, EA’s Bing Gordon – who was the keynote speaker – excitedly announced: “There’s no other university that could have put on something like this. This range of work is going on nowhere else!” To be sure, much of it is academic. Only a few presentations had content with immediate commercial potential, Gordon notes.

USC vice provost for research Cornelius Sullivan is very well aware of the university’s strengths, and of the stakes. Does USC have the potential to become the dominant academic center for the study and teaching of games? “Right now, it is ours to lose,” says Sullivan. He is determined the opportunity will not be lost.

Before the USC Games Summit, Sullivan himself had organized a meeting of interactive media researchers. Last year, noting a wave of USC activity in gaming and wanting to sound its strength and depth, Sullivan gathered together three deans and 80 faculty members involved in the field. What emerged is the University Games Steering Committee, a body that oversees the cooperative growth of game activity at USC – to ensure that strengths complement and reinforce each other rather than compete.

A top priority for the committee is the creation of an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in computer games, drawing on courses across many schools.

UTE RITTERFELD AND PETER VORDERER These researchers head an interdisciplinary group probing the impact of computer game-playing on individuals, groups and society. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

The year before, the USC Annenberg School formed its own interdisciplinary research group to probe “the impact of computer game-playing on individuals, groups, and society.” Not just their risks and dangers, but their educational opportunities. The group, led by Ute Ritterfeld and Peter Vorderer, now works on projects ranging from experimental psychology (specific brain activity while playing violent computer games) to social psychology (effects of violent computer games on male adolescent aggression) to philosophical attempts to describe game experiences (such concepts as “presence” and “flow”).

CHRIS SWAIN With Tracy Fullerton, he co-authored Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping and Playtesting Games, a seminal textbook in the gaming field. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

In one major study, USC Annenberg School researchers are performing an ultra-detailed analysis of players’ experiences in “The Sims” world – the same virtual universe that students in Chris Swain’s game-design class are hard at work enhancing.

A husband-and-wife team, Ritterfeld and Vorderer are experts in the psychology of entertainment. He is the co-editor of Playing Video Games, a comprehensive collection of essays on social and psychological aspects of the phenomenon.

“There are two ways of looking at games,” says Vorderer, “and at USC we are lucky enough to be following both paths. One is the engineering-production-creative side: everything about the product itself. But the other approach is to look at those who use the games, and see how it affects them both individually and as part of society.”


But back up a step: Is this something a research university ought to be pursing? For engineering dean C.L. Max Nikias, the imperative is clear. “The USC Viterbi School is involved in gaming because games pose engineering research challenges right at the limits of technology – in such important areas as artificial intelligence, 3D visualization and immersive environments,” he says.

Nikias is not the only engineer to see this. In March, a regional conference of the National Academy of Engineering convened at USC for “a special look at games and gaming as a newly pervasive element in society, not just as a form of entertainment, but also as a foundation for research and education.” Academic presenters included Nikias, Cinema-Television dean Elizabeth Daley, USC Annenberg School dean Geoff Cowan and USC Thornton School of Music dean Robert Cutietta.

Still, the term “videogame” carries a stigma. We think of operations to hunt down bizarre, heavily armed monsters (like the ones lurking in VKC); or high-speed chases in speeding, careening, crashing and burning vehicles. Is improving such a genre part of USC’s mission? In other words, what is the proper intersection between academe and popular culture?

Cinema’s Elizabeth Daley has been on the front lines of questions like these for years. Her mind was made up long before 2002, when her school introduced its interactive media MFA program. She’ll tell you about USC’s longstanding status as an academic center for the study and advancement of culture in dimensions beyond the printed word. (The school just celebrated its 75th anniversary.) Games, says Daley – who also directs the research-focused USC Annenberg Center for Communication, with its Institute for Multimedia Literacy – are a seamless extension of film and TV.

Videogames are a driving force in our culture, she says. “It would make no sense not to study them. When something is such a huge phenomenon, we need to address it.”

Though games culture is enabled by technology, “it is a social phenomenon – expressed and interpreted through a shifting cultural prism,” Daley adds. She points to “World of Warcraft” and “EverQuest,” games whose online communities number in the hundreds of thousands. “They have thriving economies and social infrastructures that rival those of small cities,” she says.

To understand this emerging world, Daley explains, “we want to study and understand games. We want to train the next generation of game leaders and creators. And we want to create a place – a sandbox – where new forms can emerge.”

The tools in that sandbox come from a large array of subspecialties: character design, story, graphics, 3D modeling, playtesting, movement. But one of the most important tools is bound to be artificial intelligence – a nascent field in which USC’s strength is manifest.

AI’s promise is already visible in the field of “serious games.”

MIKE ZYDA The head of USC’s GamePipe Laboratory sees the goal of serious games as instructional, not recreational. “Tactical Iraqi” puts soldiers in real-life situations. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

EA’s Bing Gordon once defined videogames as “story, art and software.” To this trio, USC’s Mike Zyda adds a fourth element: pedagogy. The goal of serious games is instructional, not recreational, explains Zyda, who directs the GamePipe Laboratory at the USC Viterbi School’s Information Sciences Institute.

Sgt. Amy Perkins of the 3rd Cavalry division is now a believer in the power of serious gaming. Perkins is a linguist who, by dint of hard study and practice, now speaks fluent Arabic. During a recent tour of duty in Iraq, she served as translator for frontline troops and helped supervise non-military contract personnel.

After a two-day training at USC in late January, she introduced her unit in Ft. Carson, Colo., to “Tactical Iraqi,” a system built on the “Unreal Tournament” engine (the same one Borquez used to create his virtual campus game). The game’s landscape is the towns, villages and houses of contemporary Iraq: its geography was taken directly from maps. Instead of gun-toting demons and robots, however, the characters in this world are ordinary humans living in a war zone.

To win the game – that is, to move up to the next level – the trainees (wearing headsets and microphones) must converse with the virtual characters without displaying rudeness in word or gesture. Game scenarios involve typical war-theater activities, such as locating a head man or checking documents at a road crossing.

Voice recognition and AI software give the Iraqi characters the ability to comprehend what is being said, so long as it’s pronounced in understandable dialect.

Perkins acknowledges that the USC-developed game “is a much better way for soldiers to learn a language” than traditional instruction. As she explained in a recent NPR “All Things Considered” segment: “These guys are not going to be sitting in a class learning Arabic – they’ve got other jobs that they have to do. And this is a computer game – and, well, all soldiers like computer games.”

Ralph Chatham of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sponsored the system, agrees: “This is the most promising project I have funded in eight years at DARPA, during which I have disbursed more than $150 million in funding.”

“Tactical Iraqi” realizes a longstanding dream for creator W. Lewis Johnson, an ISI researcher trained both as a linguist and computer scientist. The key to making it work is artificial intelligence, specifically the branch of AI that involves the creation of “agents” – programmed entities that behave like people. They are not robots: they can’t move, they don’t have bodies or even shape; they are just software. But they can “live” within a virtual world.

AI agents date back to pioneering work done in the 1970s by Allen Newell at Carnegie-Mellon University and John Laird at the University of Michigan. But only in the past decade have computing power and programming techniques begun to realize the full promise of this technology.

One of the most visible triumphs of AI came precisely in the sphere of games – the 1996 defeat of world-champion chess player Gary Kasparov by the Deep Blue system.

Deep Blue was not a USC creation, which makes it rather an oddity. The USC Viterbi School – with its resources in the top-rated Department of Computer Science and its star researchers at ISI, the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) and the Institute for Creative Technology (ICT) – boasts one of the world’s largest groups of AI specialists. As many as 50 Ph.D.-level researchers work on some form of artificial intelligence at USC; at least 20 work on AI agents.


Improved and enhanced AI, in turn, opens all kinds of new doors in gaming. Johnson, who has long investigated ways to cast AI agents in the role of teachers, says the range of topics potentially taught in this manner is endless.

Complex social skills, for example, are already being modeled at ICT, a $150 million joint venture between USC and the U.S. Army. A new example now undergoing fine-tuning is the “Think Like a Commander” system. The program uses storytelling and interactive dialogue with virtual characters to train soldiers in leadership. Trainees watch a brief video explaining a real-world situation, then engage in a natural-language dialogue with a virtual mentor about tactical concerns in the narrative. They can also interview key characters from the video.

Obviously, the depth of the interaction and the learning is directly dependent on the ability to create richer characters. Such characters might need to understand spoken language and interpret the player’s gestures: an AI problem. In instructional games, a teacher-agent has to recognize errors: another AI problem.

Other startling developing technologies will let players interact with computers in new ways. USC computer scientist and linguist Shrikanth Narayanan specializes in voices. He’s currently trying to isolate the elements that give a spoken sentence its emotional shadings of anger, boredom, fear or amusement. Meanwhile ICT researcher Frederic Pighin concentrates on facial expression. He’s working on software that can make an agent seamlessly smile, frown, roll its eyes or yawn. AI characters in games will someday have realistic expressions and nuanced voices thanks to this research.

In principle, these technologies are two-way; in other words, computers may learn to “read” the player. “Can you imagine?” says ISI GamePipe Laboratory’s Mike Zyda: “In some future games you may not be able to get to the next level unless you can convince the computer that you have the right attitude.”


Expression and voice is only the beginning. IMSC computer scientist Cyrus Shahabi specializes in analyzing what he calls “immersadata” – the flutter of signals that a player’s hand on the joystick sends to a computer. While unique to each player, these signals can form patterns.

One pattern, isolated by ICT psychological-cyberneticist Skip Rizzo, accurately identifies children diagnosed with ADHD simply by the way they interact with a virtual play environment. Such applications of instructional and recreational videogames are only beginning to unfold. Rizzo himself is using the ICT-developed game “Full Spectrum Warrior” to diagnose and help Iraq war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. “We can put the patient in a simulation that resembles the Iraqi environment and deliver trigger stimuli in a controlled environment,” he recently told Newsweek.

While much of the work on AI and serious gaming has been done by the military, at USC or by people now at USC, the field is branching out. This may be good news for parents of young children. Adam Clayton Powell III, who just took the reins at IMSC, plans a new focus on AI-enhanced games geared toward improving K through 12 education.

“This is a tremendous area of opportunity,” Powell says. “It’s a form of entertainment that has been embraced by millions – and especially school-age children. The key is to maintain the compelling attraction of play, of games and architecture, while marrying it to educational ends.”

Current educational software seldom takes advantage of existing game technologies and insights. That’s about to change, predicts William R. Swartout, director of technology at ICT. “We are going to see a much more pervasive use of games as part of the educational process,” he says. “They obviously won’t replace teachers, but teachers will be able to use games as a lab component – even for classes that don’t have labs. It adds the element of giving people concrete experiences to tie together pieces of knowledge.”

The 54-year-old computer scientist has been programming games since high school, when he first taught a time-shared computer to play blackjack. Artificial intelligence, he says, takes the process to new levels. “We’re starting to develop characters that are smarter, more adaptive. We are even starting to have characters that can model emotions,” Swartout says. In other words, a character’s attitude changes depending on her experiences in the game.

Working with Swartout on the front lines of this revolution is Mike Van Lent, a disarmingly young-looking AI specialist. (With AI pioneer John Laird, his teacher, Van Lent created the University of Michigan’s first games course in 1997.) Van Lent was the genius behind ICT’s remarkably successful “Full Spectrum Warrior” and “Full Spectrum Command” – training games developed for the Army that subsequently morphed into huge commercial hits. Van Lent began developing the system as a board game, working it through successive versions on PC, Xbox and PlayStation.

He loves games – and what he believes they can ultimately do. And he defends them passionately against detractors.

Commercial games have so much violence, Van Lent explains, because it’s easy to program violence. Right now, that’s all the AI technology can handle. The reason game characters are stereotypes is because AI can’t generate real characters yet. As AI technology becomes more sophisticated, he predicts, so will the characters, the effects and the audience for games.

“AI will make it possible to go from the dollhouse to the playhouse in games,” says Van Lent.

The “A” word – art – is unspoken, but knocking at the door. The door to USC.