Oxford, Ohio, United States
I’m a storyteller, scholar, and consultant exploring the future of storytelling and how storyworlds and technology co-evolve. After stints at MIT, Microsoft Studios and USC, I’m now an Assistant Professor in the Emerging Technology in Business and Design department at Miami University of Ohio's College of Creative Arts, Director of Miami's Games + Simulation program, Director of Miami's Worldbuilding + Narrative Design Research (WNDR) Lab, and co-editor of the Playful Thinking series for MIT Press.
In the fall of 2023, I made the jump from Assistant Teaching Professor (a non-tenure track, fully teaching-focused position) to Assistant Professor (a tenure track, teacher-scholar position). This enables me to invest more time into my games scholarship and my research on storytelling in emerging technology and the development of transmedia storyworlds via the WNDRLab, as well as my publishing work as coeditor of the Playful Thinking series for MIT Press. My first academic book, on how to use game design to create more engaging transmedia storyworlds, is currently under contract.
In January of 2022, I became the Director of Miami's Games + Simulation program. I'm using my time in academia and industry to support and advance both our students and my fellow Miami faculty. At Miami, we're weaving together strong foundations in game studies, game design and game development with futurist and entrepreneurial thinking and the latest emerging technologies to create the next generation of creators and scholars.
Upon arriving at Miami, I launched the Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDR Lab), in which I conduct my own research into transmedia storyworlds and guide my students in the development of their storyworlds, how to tell stories in new and emerging media, and how to incubate their own creative careers.
I help my clients explore the future of entertainment and how storyworlds and technology co-evolve. Between my personal consulting and my labs at MIT and USC, I've worked with BET, Cisco, the City of Los Angeles, Crystal Dynamics, DirecTV, Disney, EPB, Fanthropology, FOX, Havas, HBO, IBM, Intel, Jaguar, the Los Angeles Times, Microsoft, MTV, NerdUp, Netflix, Ravensburger, Renaissance Health, Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., and others I'm not at liberty to disclose. I provide services relating to: - transmedia franchise storytelling, planning and strategy - narrative design - worldbuilding - game design - emerging media planning (VR, AR, etc.) - the future of entertainment - the future of marketing - UI/UX design - identity design and branding
As a member of the English department, the Digital Liberal Arts initiative and Whittier's self-directed Whittier Scholars program, I taught Introduction to Media Studies, the World Wide Web (aka "Storyteller as Startup: Using the Web to Make a Creative Living"), Introduction to Game Design, Transmedia Storytelling, Worldbuilding the Real World, and others. I also advised the Whittier e-sports team, served as faculty advisor and/or sponsor to multiple student advisees, and directed the Whittier Other Worlds Lab (WOW Lab), in which I helped my students incubate both storyworlds and their careers as creative professionals.
I taught courses on video game design, incorporating elements of worldbuilding, narrative design, and entrepreneurship.
As the Creative Director for the World Building Media Lab and World Building Institute at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, I led explorations into how we imagine new worlds both in fiction and in scenario planning, how new technologies figure into the envisioning and experiencing of those worlds, and how best practices of vast transmedia storyworlds can be applied to solving real-world challenges. In addition to overseeing the operations of the lab and managing our partnerships with sponsors and partners across industry, academia, and government, I oversaw our research initiatives, including: - Dry City, which imagined Lagos, Nigeria in 2035 after drinkable water was privatized, and was showcased at the 2017 Venice Biennale - Project Tesseract, a reimagining of transmedia development pipelines to improve both efficiency and audience experiences that culminated in Wonder Buffalo, a collaboration with USC's Entertainment Technology Center, FOX, Technicolor, Warner Bros., 8i and others that combined a short film made "in the cloud" and a VR experience made using cutting-edge photogrammetry which premiered at Sundance and SXSW and was nominated for an Emmy in technical excellence - The World in a Single Cell, a collaboration with USC's Dornsife College of Arts and Sciences and Havas XVIII that imagined a smart city based on a human pancreatic beta cell to inspire both future smart cities and future pancreatic cancer treatments - Frontera, a Science of Fiction artscience event that imagined of how women entrepreneurs might flourish in a future fusion of San Diego and Tijuana and, by extension, how they can set themselves up to succeed now, produced with Pigeon Hole Productions - Spaceship Earth 2050, a collaboration with the Buckminster Fuller Institute that empowered school kids to imagine an intergalactic starship based on Fuller's metaphor/argument that we must treat our planet as a spaceship with limited, but renewable, resources
As first the Technical Director, later the Creative Director, and a Research Fellow for the Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, I provided creative and technical leadership on emerging technological, economic and cultural developments and their impact on society, media, and entertainment. My labmates and I provided consulting, insight, research and other guidance to such lab sponsors as Cisco, DirecTV, EPB, FOX, Havas Media, HBO, IBM, Jaguar, the Los Angeles Times, Warner Bros., and ioTHEATRE. One focus at the AIL was the Edison Project, a multi-year research initiative that argues the Media and Entertainment industry is experiencing its most pitched rate of change since Edison invented the kinetoscope. That change can be seen across the New Screens (e.g., virtual reality, augmented reality, wearable devices, and the Internet of Things), the New Creators and Makers (the YouTube Generation and beyond), the New Metrics and Measurement (including the lab's Leveraging Engagement framework, which measures audience motivations across demographics), the New Funding and Business Models (e.g., Kickstarter, Patreon) and the New Public Spaces (smart cities as communications platforms). My responsibilities included overseeing the creation of both Prototypes and Publications to demonstrate and disseminate the lab's ideas and insights, plus such Participatory Learning Events as courses and workshops (e.g., the CRUNCH Student Design Challenge, a "startup bootcamp" created by AIL Managing Director and Research Fellow Erin Reilly and co-taught by Reilly, AIL Research Fellow Francesca Marie Smith, the Blackstone LaunchPad's Ian Donahue and myself) and our intense daylong Think + Do workshops that bring together academics, industry leaders, and wild cards to spark new ideas and opportunities for collaboration.
I joined Microsoft to work in a "Future of Media and Entertainment" think tank in the Office of the CTO/CXO of the Entertainment and Devices division. I worked with numerous teams across the company, including Studios, marketing, and the ISS (IEB Software and Services) platform team to shape and shepherd the company's vision for its next 10-20 years. After a little over a year, I moved to Microsoft Studios to cofound the Narrative Design Team, which was chartered to put that vision into practice, developing vast storyworlds that would unfold across Microsoft's entire entertainment platform for a decade or more, including on screens that didn't exist yet. Shipped projects while at Microsoft included: - HoloLens - Xbox One - SmartGlass - Halo: Forward Unto Dawn webisodes - Quantum Break game + video series - Ryse: Sword of Damocles game + interactive comic - Adera game + novel While at Microsoft, I: - Conducted research, wrote case studies, gave lectures, and consulted internally on how entertainment and technology co-evolve, initially under CTO/CXO J Allard and later under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie - Cofounded Microsoft Studios’ Narrative Design team to develop new blockbuster transmedia IP franchises for all of Microsoft’s entertainment platforms - Developed new entertainment franchises from competitive analysis and portfolio review through ideation, pitch decks, story bibles, and long-term franchise strategy; evaluated dormant IPs and new IP pitches for development - Worked closely with development studios, marketing, content partners, hardware R&D, audience research, and executive leadership to shepherd projects to completion