Christopher Swain, B.A.

Assistant Professor
Research Associate Professor
Co-Director, USC Games Institute

310.403.0798
cswain@cinema.usc.edu
SCA 218
interactive.usc.edu/research/games

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

He co-founded the EA Game Innovation Lab at USC.
His serious game lab projects include:
•    The Redistricting Game
Funding: USC Annenberg Center for Communication.
•    Immune Attack
Funding: National Science Foundation; Created in collaboration with Brown University the Federation of American Scientists.
•    ELECT-BiLat and ELECT urbanSIM
Funding: U.S. Army; Produced for the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
•    The New New Deal
Funding: Rockefeller Foundation; Produced in collaboration with the Los Angeles 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, Swain 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.

Swain 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.