Christopher Swain, B.A.

Assistant Professor
Co-Director, EA Game Innovation Lab

310.403.0798
cswain@cinema.usc.edu
interactive.usc.edu/research/games

Chris Swain is a game designer, educator, and co-author of the textbook Game Design Workshop.

He co-directs the EA Game Innovation Lab at USC.  His serious game lab projects include:
•    The Redistricting Game – funded by the Annenberg Center for Communication
•    Immune Attack – funded by National Science Foundation and created in collaboration with Brown University and the Federation of American Scientists.
•    ELECT-BiLat and ELECT urbanSIM– funded by the US Army and produced for the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
•    The New New Deal – funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and produced in collaboration with the LA Times.

He was a faculty advisor to three USC teams accepted into the Independent Games Festival: Dyadin 2005, Cloud 2006, and P.B. Winterbottom 2008.

Prior to coming to USC, Chris worked on games for Microsoft, Sony, Disney, Activision, Acclaim, and many others. He was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive. At R/GA he led over 150 projects for clients that included AOL, Warner Brothers, PBS, Intel, Children’s Television Workshop, and many others. He was a creator of NetWits – a massively multiplayer online game show - for the Microsoft Network. Other notable projects include Multiplayer Wheel of Fortune and Multiplayer Jeopardy! for Sony Online, and Weakest Link Interactive for NBC.

Chris was a founding member of the start-up Spiderdance, Inc. He served on the Board of Directors of the Emmy’s from 2000-2004. His work has received many awards including Time Magazine’s Best of the Web. He started his career at the pioneering interactive firm Synapse Technologies.