March 2016 Playthink - Dress Rehearsal

Please join us 6:00pm on Monday, March 7th in SCI 201 at the USC School of Cinematic Arts for a discussion about games and play as art and culture. The theme for this Playthink salon is “Dress Rehearsal.”

Featured guests include:

Katie Salen is an active game designer, one of the founders of the Institute of Play, and a pioneer in applying game design principles to challenges outside the field of commercial game development. Katie is a Professor in the School of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University. She lectures widely and writes extensively on game design, design education and gamer culture. She has co-authored or edited several books, including Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, The Game Design Reader and The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning.

Miguel Sicart is a play and games scholar based at the IT University in Copenhagen. He has conducted research on the ethical role of videogames in culture, publishing two books on the topic: The Ethics of Computer Games (The MIT Press, 2009) and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (The MIT Press, 2013). His most recent work situates play at the core of contemporary aesthetics and design practices, a program he presented in Play Matters (The MIT Press, 2014), a manifesto for studying play beyond games.

Margaret Moser is an experienced technical director and game designer with a background in mobile as well as experimental designs, including projects with the New York based development studios Playmatics and Leisure Collective.

Jane Pinckard: Formerly Associate Director at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media, Jane Pinckard has a long history in the games industry, including Business Development Analyst at Foundation 9 Entertainment and Founder of GameGirlAdvance.

Bonnie Ruberg is a postdoctoral scholar in the Interactive Media and Games Division at USC, where her research and teaching address gender, sexuality, and identity in video games. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Queer Game Studies, the lead organizer of the annual Queerness and Games Conference, the author of a number of publications on gender and sexuality in digital media, and a former technology journalist. Bonnie received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.