If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts. (Well, I would have also said “Who’s Kelly Link?” back then, but that’s beside the point.)
If you’d told me that I would have gotten the chance to meet Rand Miller (the co-creator of Myst), Bill Willingham (who writes Fables), befriend Raph Koster and listen to a lecture by Guillermo del Toro in that same year, I’d’ve told you that you were also insane.
If you’d told me that if you extended that window out to eighteen months it would also include getting to meet Jeff Smith and graduating from MIT, I’d’ve told you were completely barking mad.
Yet, that’s the eighteen months it’s been for me. When I look back on 2007-2008 and think about all this economic disaster and political hoo-rah and all the rest of the bizarreness afoot in the world, that’s what I should remember – that this year-and-some-change has been amazing, wonderful and incredibly stimulating.
All of this is brought up by my attending back-to-back lectures by both Stephen Greenblatt (the noted New Historicist from Harvard) here at MIT and Jonathan Carroll (one of my favorite novelists) at the Harvard Bookstore last night. Consider my mind officially blown.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
