Hit List Q&A: Jesse Schell, Schell Games CEO

In the "Hit List" from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, the video game industry's top talents describe their current gaming addictions, their most anticipated releases and more. This week: Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell.

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A note from the AIAS:Jesse is the CEO of Schell Games, the largest videogame studio in Pennsylvania. He also serves as Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Jesse has worked on a wide variety of innovative game and simulation projects for both entertainment and education, but he is best known for his award winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses and for Beyond Facebook, a talk at the 2010 DICE Summit where he described a future where games and life become indistinguishable. He is a former chair of the International Game Developers Association, and in 2004 he was named one of the world's Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT Technology Review. Before starting his own company, Jesse was the Creative Director of the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, which helped to develop interactive theme park attractions as well as Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for children. Before that, he worked as writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer's Mime Circus and the Juggler's Guild.

Jesse will be speaking at the 2013 D.I.C.E. Summit on "The Secret Mechanisms." The world of game design is changing. New systems of distribution and payment are making even seasoned designers feel naïve. The key to understanding what business models and what game concepts will work is to understand the human mind, for the mind is the medium in which game designers work. Far from an inert surface, the human mind has thousands of complex mechanisms that determine a game's success or failure. Continuing the theme of Jesse's landmark 2010 DICE talk, this talk gathers mechanisms from far and wide: art, psychology, advertising, music, architecture, poetry, science, storytelling – nothing is off-limits, and special attention is paid to the mechanisms that can help us understand how to live, thrive, and survive in this post-retail world of game development.