The Play's the Thing: Practicing Play as Community Foundation and Design Technique

Tracy Fullerton's paper describes the USC Game Design Community, an extracurricular, cross-departmental initiative at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television and Annenberg Center for Communication. Its central thesis is that shared play experiences can give students and researchers from disparate disciplines a common vocabulary, social bonds, and collaboratively generated design concepts. The initiative is presented as a complement to formal integrated curriculum, addressing the concern that game development increasingly demands cross-disciplinary teamwork that is currently left to chance.

The community's activities over its first year are the paper's main evidence. The Cooperative Game Play Experiment, drawing on the 1970s New Games Movement and led by Bernie DeKoven, was judged the most successful event, with its outdoor, technology-free format and the "play hard, play fair, nobody hurt" motto credited with sustaining discussion. Surrealist Game Play Experiments, Game Salons analyzing commercial titles for invited industry guests, and a USC versus Carnegie Mellon online competition are also described, along with lessons on coordination, rivalry, and follow-up. The events were evaluated informally by community members rather than through systematic measurement, a limitation the author implicitly acknowledges.

The paper concludes with the Game Innovation Lab Research Grant, which offers up to $20,000 and lab resources to interdisciplinary student teams. Two funded projects, Dyadin and Cloud, are highlighted, both built by teams spanning Interactive Media and Engineering students. The author describes the initiative as young and its conclusions as preliminary, framing success in terms of future cross-disciplinary collaboration.