Professor of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media & Games Division, University of Southern California
Electronic Arts Endowed Chair, Interactive Entertainment
Director, USC Game Innovation Lab
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Tracy Fullerton is an experimental game designer, professor and chair of the Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, as well as director of the interdisciplinary USC Games program, a collaboration with the Viterbi School of Engineering. Fullerton also works with the Digital Equity in Education team at the Pullias Center for Higher Education.
Her research center, the Game Innovation Lab, has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, and The Night Journey, with artist Bill Viola. She is currently working on Walden, a simulation of Henry David Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond supported by multiple grants from the NEA and NEH. Fullerton is the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide, and holder of the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. Recent projects include a suite of college preparation games co-created with the Pullias Center’s Digital Equity in Education team and funded by the Department of Education, the Gilbert Foundation and the Gates Foundation; and Reality Ends Here, an alternate reality game for incoming freshmen at the School of Cinematic Arts.
Prior to joining USC, she was president and founder of the interactive television game developer, Spiderdance, Inc. Spiderdance’s games included NBC’s Weakest Link, MTV’s webRIOT, The WB’s No Boundaries, History Channel’s History IQ, Sony Game Show Network’s Inquizition and TBS’s Cyber Bond.
Before starting Spiderdance, Fullerton was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive, creative director at the interactive film studio Interfilm and a designer at Robert Abel’s early interactive company Synapse. Fullerton’s work has received numerous honors including an Emmy nomination for interactive television, Indiecade’s “Sublime Experience,” “Impact,” and “Trailblazer” awards, Games for Change “Game Changer” award, and TIME magazine’s Best of the Web.