Chris Swain (game designer)


Chris Swain is an American game designer, entrepreneur, and professor. He is the founder of two venture-backed game companies. He worked full-time as a professor at USC 2004-2011.
At USC Chris co-founded the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and was co-author of the book "Game Design Workshop" which is used at many of the over 700 college game programs around the world. He served as a thesis advisor to Jenova Chen and the project fl0w which began as Chen's MFA thesis and was the basis for the game developer thatgamecompany which has won multiple Game of the Year awards in industry. In addition Swain was a faculty advisor to seven student games accepted into the including the award-winning .
His USC research projects include:
Prior to coming to USC Chris was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive. At R/GA he led development of over 50 interactive products for companies that include Microsoft, Sony, Disney, Activision, America Online, Warner Bros., PBS, BBC, Intel, IBM, Kodak, Discovery Channel, Ticketmaster, and many other companies. Notable projects include: for the Microsoft Network, and for Sony Online, for Children's Television Workshop, and Poetry of Structure – the interactive companion to Ken Burns’ documentary about .
Chris was VP of Programming at game developer Spiderdance’s participatory television projects included webRIOT for MTV and Weakest Link Interactive for NBC among others.
Chris has served on the Board of Directors of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and on the Board of Advisors for the American Film Institute’s , Games for Change, , , and other organizations. He started his career in at Robert Abel’s pioneering interactive software company Synapse Technologies.
His projects have received many awards including Time Magazine’s Best of the Web.