| Presenter(s) |  Richard Lemarchand is a game designer, an educator, a writer, a public speaker and a consultant. He is an Associate Professor in the USC Games program, and is the Associate Chair of the Interactive Media & Games Division of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Between 2004 and 2012, Richard was a lead game designer at Naughty Dog in Santa Monica, California. He led the design of all three PlayStation 3 games in the Uncharted series including Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - winner of ten AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards, five Game Developers Choice Awards, four BAFTAs and over 200 Game of the Year awards. Richard also worked on Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing for Naughty Dog, and helped to create the successful game series Gex, Pandemonium and Soul Reaver at Crystal Dynamics in the San Francisco Bay Area. Richard now teaches game design, development and production in the USC Games program, and is working on a series of experimental game design research projects as part of the USC Game Innovation Lab. His most recent game, The Meadow, a virtual reality art installation game co-created with Martzi Campos, was selected as a finalist in the 2015 IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games. Learn more about Richard.
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| Description | For more than two decades, Richard Lemarchand worked as a game designer in the console game industry, working for companies like Naughty Dog and Crystal Dynamics on titles as diverse as Gex and Uncharted. In 2012 he made a sudden and quite radical change of career, becoming a full-time professor in the USC Games program at the University of Southern California. Faced with the challenge of revising old classes and creating new ones, Lemarchand turned to what he knew best—game design—not to gamify the curriculum, but to bring principles of human-centered design to his classes, even as he ate up up knowledge and wisdom from the experienced scholars around him. As he enters his fifth year as a professor of game design, Lemarchand is excited to bring his ideas to Meaningful Play: to reflect on playful making, the value of theory and research, the importance of systems thinking and rules-based design in practice, pedagogy and professionalism, and how games academia can help change the unhealthy cultures of "crunch" that permeate so much of the game industry and tech industry. |
