Seminar Series

The Danger of Red Lining – Why 100% capacity utilization leads to fragility, failed goals and misery

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:30:27 -0800

Date: 10 November 2011, 10:30am - Noon in Tutor Hall 321
Speaker: Michael Saladino, Riot Games

Abstract
Teams are often pushed to the breaking point by immediate business needs. The reasons are two-fold: we want immediate, recognizable business value and we don’t like the idea of people “not working”. But this model suffers from productivity thrashing, it’s unsustainable and it ignores bottom-up value creation opporutunites. Michael Saladino will propose a better way based on real-world scenarios.

Bio
Michael Saladino has been an engineer and project leader for nearly 20 years. Throughout his career he has worked companies big and small including EA, Microsoft, Presto Studios, Volition, and Riot Games. Whether it’s as lead engineer, technical director or executive producer, Michael has a track record of delivering AAA games and building high-functioning teams.

Electronic Arts President Speaks to Joint GamePipe Marshall IMD Group

Tue, 8 Nov 2011 17:00:06 -0800

Date: 8 November 2011, 5pm to 6:30pm, SCA-108
Speaker: Frank Gibeau, President, Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts President, Frank Gibeau, is giving a presentation to a joint seminar of USC GamePipe Laboratory, USC Marshall and USC Interactive Media students. The presentation is 5pm to 6:30pm in the School of Cinematic Arts SCA-108 Building.

Bio
In 2011, Frank Gibeau was appointed President of EA where he leads the transformation of the company into a digital entertainment powerhouse by bringing world-class properties to all gaming platforms – Console, PC, Mobile and Social. He is responsible for product development, worldwide product management and marketing for all packaged goods and online offerings within the four EA Labels; EA SPORTS, EA Games, the Play Label and the BioWare Label. Gibeau’s global operation spans a dozen studio locations with more than 5,000 employees. Gibeau comes to this role after a 4-year tenure as President of the EA Games Label. During that period, Gibeau led a turn-around that greatly increased product quality and on time delivery while dramatically driving down costs.

The intellectual properties under Gibeau’s auspices include blockbusters such as: Battlefield, Command & Conquer, Dead Space, Dragon Age, FIFA, Madden NFL, Mass Effect, Medal of Honor, Need for Speed, NBA Jam, NCAA Football NHL, SimCity, Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Sims, Spore, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Warhammer Online and more. He also oversees the strategic EA Partners business that includes publishing and distribution relationships with such award-winning studios as Respawn Entertainment, Insomniac, 38 Studios, Valve, Epic Games, Funcom and Crytek.

Prior to serving as President of the EA Games Label, Gibeau acted as Executive Vice President and General Manager of The Americas where he was directly responsible for a publishing operation that accounted for more than $1.5B of EA’s annual revenue. In this role, Gibeau directly oversaw product marketing, branding, public relations, marketing communications, sales, operations, and finance. Previously, Gibeau served as Senior Vice President of North American marketing and has held a variety of senior publishing posts at EA. In these roles, Gibeau was responsible for driving the go-to-market strategy for the EA and EA SPORTS brands as well as the launch of hundreds of game franchises across multiple platforms that have shipped since 1991.
Gibeau sits on the Board of Directors of Cooliris, an internet technology company that develops award-winning browser and advertising technology. He is also a two time winner of The Sports Business Journal’s “Forty under Forty” Sports Executives (2006 & 2007) and one of Advertising Age’s 2004 Entertainment Marketers of the Year.

Gibeau received a B.S. degree from the University of Southern California and a M.B.A. from Santa Clara University. He lives in Atherton, with his wife, Solveig and their three children.

Now Playing: Battlefield 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Sims Social and NCAA Football 2012

Schedule of Events for Frank Gibeau

2:00pm - 2:40pm - Visit with select Marshall students  2:45pm - 3:45pm - CS/CTIN 491/529 Student Game demos RTH-321  3:50pm - 4:25pm - Viterbi Dean Yannis Yortsos - OHE 200 (Zyda to escort visitor to SCA 465)  4:40pm - 5pm Cinematic Arts Dean Daley, SCA 465  5pm to 6:30pm - Talk in SCA-108

Start Engine - a Startup Accelerator for Game Development

Thu, 3 Nov 2011 10:30:07 -0700

Date: 3 November 2011, 10:30am - Noon in Tutor Hall 321
Speaker: Howard Marks, Start Engine

I plan to talk about why a startup accelerator works for building game startups. I will also talk about why HTML5 and social games are a good opportunity for new startups.

Bio
Howard is a 30-year industry entrepreneur, having co-founded juggernaut Activision as well as Acclaim Games. After its acquisition by Playdom, he was most recently head of the Acclaim studio and Sr. VP, Strategic Planning at Disney Interactive Media Group. Howard is now CEO of Gamzee, a new social game company building games for the new Facebook mobile platform in HTML5. Howard recently announced he has formed Start Engine, a startup accelerator located in Westwood and focused on helping entrepreneurs become successful in 90 days.

linkedin bio is here.

Start Engine web site is here.

Disney Interactive Media Group’s Online Strategies

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:30:40 -0700

Date: 20 October 2011, 10:30am - Noon in Tutor Hall 321
Speaker: James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group

Abstract
During his talk, Jimmy will discuss strategies for building immersive online entertainment experiences that truly stand apart and engage consumers. He will share his thoughts on programming to online audiences, original video, the online advertising business and give insight into how his division is transforming The Walt Disney Company's presence on the web and what digital media means to the company's future.

James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group
James Pitaro is co-president of Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG), the interactive entertainment segment of The Walt Disney Company. In his role, Mr. Pitaro oversees Disney Online, which serves as the online, mobile web, and social media gateway to everything Disney. Disney Online produces number one ranked community-family and parenting web destinations, made up of Disney.com and the Disney Family network of websites, which includes Disney Family.com, FamilyFun.com, Kaboose.com, and Babyzone.com. Mr. Pitaro also oversees DigiSynd, which manages The Walt Disney Company’s brand presence in the social media space.

Prior to joining DIMG, Mr. Pitaro served as vice president of Yahoo! Media where he was responsible for guiding the strategic growth and continued development of Yahoo!’s media properties. Prior to that role, Mr. Pitaro was vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Sports where he was credited with leading the website to its position as the number one online sports destination. Previous to that role, Mr. Pitaro served as vice president and head of business affairs for Yahoo! Music, where he was instrumental in making it the web’s number one music site.

Before joining the Yahoo! team, Mr. Pitaro was vice president of business affairs for LAUNCH Media, Inc and practiced law at several New York firms.

Student-Driven 3D Game Engine Development: Practical Approach

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:30:06 -0800

Building a 3D Game Engine from scratch in C++ is a huge engineering challenge. However, it brings deep knowledge and insights about game development that can't be acquired in any other way in a school and could take years to learn in the industry. Unfortunately, students don't usually venture to build a game engine from scratch. Instead, they choose to use a 3rd party engine like Unity or UDK. This, however, is very limiting because nuts and bolts are hidden in unavailable source code.

In the presentation I will talk about how to build a student-driven 3D game engine and what can be done to minimize the development time. I will use the example of PrimeEngine PC/XBox360 framework that I am in charge of and that was built within USC GamePipe classes. The engine is now being used by USC students for building Kinect games and is proving to be usable. I will talk about how the components (s.a. engine core, scripting, debugging tools, game level editor, etc) of the framework were implemented and what design choices were made.

Bio
My name is Artem Kovalovs. I am gameplay programmer at Electronic Arts Los Angeles working on an
unannounced 3rd person shooter. During my school years at USC, I worked for NVIDIA corporation for 1 year on NVIDIA Parallel Nsight (GPU debugging and profiling tool). I am also in charge of PrimeEngine 3D game framework for PC and XBox360 that I built (with help from other students) while at USC.

A look at a high concurrency infrastructure for online gaming

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:00:16 -0700

Date: 29 April 2010, 10:00am - 11:30am in Tutor Hall 321
Speakers: John Bojorquez, VP of Technology, Treyarch
& Pat Griffith, VP of Technology, Activision

Abstract
The purpose of this talk is to explain the architecture of the centralized server infrastructure which supports most of Activision’s (non-Blizzard) titles. This infrastructure has evolved over the years, initially supporting titles with just several hundreds of simultaneous users. Today, this infrastructure supports upwards of millions simultaneous users spanning multiple titles and hardware platforms. Aspects of security and scalable architecture will be covered. This is a continuation of the presentation we originally gave here at Gamepipe in ’09.

Bios
John Bojorquez, Vice President of Technology, Treyarch
Although John has played a role on every Call of Duty game made at Treyarch, his credits extend far beyond, including at Gray Matter, NovaLogic, and running his own game development companies (making games for Activision and for all you Mech 2 fans!). John is the former VP of Online at Activision. He began his game development career almost twenty years ago developing games for the Sega Genesis.

Pat Griffith, Vice President of Technology, Activision
Pat oversees many of the elements relating to online development at Activision.

From Products to Services: How studio & marketing work together to develop great game experiences

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 10:00:10 -0700

Date: 25 March 2010, 10:00am - 11:30am in Tutor Hall 321
Speaker: John Buchanan, Vice President of Marketing, EA Play Label, Electronic Arts

Abstract
As the game industry continues to evolve from products to ongoing services and experiences, John Buchanan will provide an overview of process and techniques that marketing and game development teams use to work closely together to identify, develop and market game experiences for players. This lecture will use examples of games that are in market and how teams closely collaborated to bring these games to market

Bio
As Vice President of Marketing for the Play Label of Electronic Arts, John is responsible for leading global marketing strategy for some of the industry’s best-selling video game franchises including The Sims, Harry Potter, Spore, My Sims as well as the Hasbro portfolio. These well known franchises transcend consumer audiences and bring rich, fun and deeply engaging interactive entertainment experiences to kids, adults and families all over the world.
 In this role, John was responsible for global marketing and execution of EA’s biggest PC launch in its history with the award-winning title, The Sims 3, which became the #1 best-selling PC game in NA and Europe in 2009. The Hasbro branded video games have sold a combined total of more than eight million units at retail globally. EA has launched 20 different Hasbro brands on 18 major digital platforms since the strategic alliance between EA and Hasbro was formed in August 2007. Heading into 2010, John will oversee over a dozen franchise launches in 2010 across all brands within the Play Label.

Prior to his current role, John was the Senior Director of Marketing for EA’s Casual Entertainment label heading up marketing and business development efforts across several franchises in EA’s portfolio. Before joining EA in 2008, John headed up Worldwide Product Marketing, Strategic Planning and Sales for Cranium, one of the best selling board games in the history of the toy industry. Prior to Cranium, John was the Director of Marketing for Hot Wheels at Mattel, where he also held leadership roles in Customer Marketing during his four years there.

John received two Bachelor of Science degrees, International Relations and Political Science, from the University of Southern California and lives in San Francisco with his wife Samantha and son Braden.

How a First-Person Shooter Game Engine Works

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 10:00:37 -0800

Date: 4 March 2010, 10:00am - 11:30am in Tutor Hall 321
Speaker: Waylon Brinck, CG Supervisor, EA LA

Abstract
In this lecture, Waylon Brinck will give a high-level demonstration of all of the major features that make up a first-person shooter game engine. Using the freely-available Unreal Development Kit, Waylon will show which features are present in the editor and at runtime, and the workflows associated with them. He’ll also demonstrate how the Medal of Honor team has tailored the engine to meet their needs.

Biography
Waylon Brinck has been designing and creating video games since he was a young child. He began his professional career in 1998 when he co-founded Guild Software, an indie game development house, in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the intervening years he’s racked up game dev experience in multiple disciplines including art, design and engineering. He is currently CG Supervisor at EA Los Angeles on the new Medal of Honor game. His personal web page is here.

NVIDIA Parallel Nsight (codenamed "Nexus") and the Future of GPU Programming

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:00:57 -0800

Date: 25 February 2010, 10:00am - 11:30am in Tutor Hall 321
Speaker: Artem Kovalov, USC GamePipe Laboratory & nVidia Intern

Abstract
GPUs get more and more complex and are now massively parallel processors. In addition to graphics processing, GPUs are now replacing CPUs in supercomputers, as well as are used for general purpose
computations. To alleviate problems faced when programming, next-gen dev-tools have to provide easy interface and powerful debugging of GPU and CPU. NVIDIA Parallel Nsight (codenamed "Nexus") brings GPU Computing into Visual Studio 2008. Debug, profile, and analyze GPU code using standard workflow and tools. Parallel Nsight supports CUDA C, OpenCL, DirectCompute, Direct3D, and OpenGL.

I will conduct NVIDIA Parallel Nsight demo running with Emergent Gamebryo LightSpeed Engine - a professional engine used in the industry. In addition I might go through some other DX{10,11} samples as well as some CUDA programs.

Unfortunately, students usually skip GPU programming by going to high-level programming environments. I will use this opportunity to talk about GPU and what's going on inside of it.

I will also touch upon the new NVIDIA Fermi chip architecture and new features of DirectX11 and where the GPU is headed.

Useful Links
NVIDIA Parallel Nsight: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nexus.html
What is CUDA?: http://www.nvidia.com/object/what_is_cuda_new.html

Bio
About 7 months ago Artem Kovalov tricked his way into NVIDIA and is somehow still there. He brags to be on the Parallel Nsight (formerly known Nexus) team while pursuing B.S. in CS Games at USC. He is also known to a couple of people as a lead engineer for the Arcane Project. He developed the PyEngine game engine and is now managing the team developing PyEngine2.0 powering the Arcane game (demo: link to demo).

Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:00:04 -0800

Date: 11 February 2010, 10:00am - 11:30am in Tutor Hall 321
Speaker: Erik Meijer, Microsoft

Abstract
According to Wikipedia, “Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose.” Unfortunately, in the past 50 years or so of Computer Science, we have abstracted from the wrong details. In particular, the mainstream interactive, imperative sequential computational model takes a deep dependency on strict evaluation order, exemplified by the evil semicolon “;”, thereby ignoring latency and to a large extent the possibility of failure (which can be considered as a form of latency).

Now that effectively all computation has become reactive, distributed and concurrent, the traditional sequential imperative programming abstraction has run out of steam as a model for the top-level composition of programs and seriously hampers future progress in our field.

Not all hope is lost however. It turns out that the familiar archetypal IEnumerable/IEnumerator design pattern for interactive computation is dual to the even familiar archetypal IObservable/IObserver design pattern for reactive programming.

We show how as a consequence of this formal duality, we can model reactive applications using push-based, observable collections, and how to glue together complex event processing and asynchronous programs using declarative LINQ queries.

Bio
Erik Meijer is an accomplished programming-language designer who has worked on a wide range of languages, including Haskell, Mondrian, X#, Cω, C#, and Visual Basic. He runs the Cloud Languages Team in the Business Platform Division at Microsoft, where his primary focus has been to remove the impedance mismatch between databases and programming languages in the context of the Cloud. One of the fruits of these efforts is LINQ, which not only adds a native querying syntax to .NET languages, such as C# and Visual Basic, but also allows developers to query data sources other than tables, such as objects or XML. Most recently, Erik has been working on “Democratizing the Cloud” and preaching the virtues of fundamentalist functional programming in the new age of concurrency and many-core. Some people might recognize him from his brief stint as the “Head in the Box” on Microsoft VBTV. These days, you can regularly watch Erik’s interviews on the “Expert-to-Expert”, “Going Deep”, and “Functional Programming Lectures” series on Channel 9.