In this lecture, I'll share a bit about myself and my background. My name is Brian Winn, and I'm a professor in the Department of Media and Information and the Director of the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University. I'm also a Co-Founder of Will Winn Games. I was born in 1971, one year before Pong was released to the arcade. At the early age of seven, I can remember going to the pizza parlor with my family and seeing Space Invaders for the 1st time. I was hooked. I would beg my dad for quarters to play. This continued over the next few years as a flurry of arcade games came on the scene. From Asteroids to Pac-Man to Donkey Kong. These early games really helped shape my view of game design. When I was around nine years old, my family got an Atari 2600. This was the 1st time I could play digital games at home. Of course, the games were not as good as the arcade equivalents, but rather than beg for quarters after each game over screen, I could play games for hours on end and really start to think about what made a good game a good game. Two years later, we got an Apple 2 Plus computer. Rather than buy games for the computer, my dad bought me a book, something like How to Program Games and Basic. I began to learn to program. I first copied the code directly from the book into the computer. Then I began to modify the code to change and expand the games. Eventually, I was able to write entire new games based on the techniques that I had learned. Of course, they were very primitive by today standards, but it launched my love of creating interactive entertainment. This ultimately led me to pursue computer science as an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota Duluth. This is where I really learned how to program properly. During the summer of my junior year, I interned at IBM. While I cherished my time there and learned a lot, ultimately I decided I did not want to work on traditional software projects, I really wanted to work on games. This led me to pursue graduate school. I ended up going to Michigan State University for graduate school with a focus on computer science, artificial intelligence, and human computer interaction. While this was the best decision I ever made, unfortunately at the time, there were no courses in game design and development. After all, this was the first half of the 1990s and the universities had not yet developed any curriculum in this area. The closest course I could find was called hypermedia design. In this class, we used a multimedia authoring tool called Director to craft interactive media experiences. For the final project, we were tasked to create an autobiography, sort of an early version of a homepage or LinkedIn profile. Rather than a straightforward menu of information, I created an interactive game called The Case of the Salami Slicer, where you learned about me through role-playing as an investigative reporter trying to break the next big story. This course solidified my desire to create interactive experiences and games. After graduation in 1995, I worked for 10 years building interactive media projects for the communication technology lab at Michigan State University. We created dozens of educational CD-ROMs and websites, many of which included games or game-like elements. In 2005, I founded the Game for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University. The mission of the GEL Lab is to design innovative prototypes, techniques, and complete games for entertainment and learning and to advance the state of the art knowledge about games. I continue to direct the lab to this day. In my time at the lab, I programmed, designed, and/or produced over 30 game projects. You can learn more about the GEL Lab at gel.msu.edu. In 2020, I helped start the company Will Winn Games, with the goal of creating games that bring players together to have shared entertainment experiences. Plunder Panic is our 1st game, a swashbuckling up to 12 player action arcade game where two rival crews battle for supremacy on the high seas. If you love games like Super Smash Brothers or TowerFall, you should check it out. Overall, I've got experience making games in both academic and commercial settings. My early experiences developing games and interactive media led me into teaching. In the fall of 2000, I taught the first ever special topics course in game development at MSU. The special topics course was very popular and was soon made into a regular course. This one course quickly grew to two courses. In the summer of 2005, the Department of Media and Information decided to go all in on games. We formulated a unique interdisciplinary program in game design and development. The program grew to be a top 10 ranked program in 2011 and continues its high rankings today. In 2020, we launched our full undergraduate major in games and interactive media, representing another major milestone in the MSU's game development program. My goal as a teacher is to motivate my students and create a structured learning environment that actively engages them in the subject matter. In that sense, I may guide, coach, and mentor more than the proverbial sage on the stage. Making games is hard. Making good games is even harder. In order for my students to succeed, they need to build their technical and creative skills. To do this, I try to create authentic real-world problems for my students to work on. This means that the students have to create games and they end up creating a lot of games as they go through my courses. I really stress iterative development. That is design, prototype, playtest, and refine. The more times you can go through the iterative loop, the more you will learn and the better your games will get. Of course, making games is not typically a one-person affair. Modern game development requires teams of individuals with complimentary skill sets working together in harmony. For this reason, I also really stress soft skills with my classes, such as communication, collaboration, negotiation, ideation, time management, and leadership. For many of my students, creating games is a labor of love. My goal is to harness this passion, polish, refine, and nurture it and push my students to advance not only themselves, but also the art and science of making games. So that's a bit about me, my background, and some context around this course and the MSU game development program. I look forward to learning and working with you across this course.
