That brings me to one of my last points, which is the USC Esports Union, which we founded under our division. It’s founded to host teams from all over USC and regulate that in a way to keep it healthy, fun, and functional. That’s another one of our big initiatives that Jim Huntley is managing for us. There’s a lot going on in trying to do esports well. It’s so new that people are trying different things. We have a lot of strategies around how to do that well. We want to try to get, certainly, the toxicity out of it, and get it to a bigger sense of fun and a social experience around events, where people can gather around games and have fun, have some more casual activities. We want to make it more inclusive, so it’s not just elite, hardcore players.
The last thing is we’re going to be going further into board game design and production. It’s been a foundational part of our program, but our students are able to actually Kickstart and ship games before they graduate out of there. We’re getting pretty good at it. The board game industry is a viable career path now. It’s exploding. For our students who are interested, we’re going to be offering more classes in board game design and production. Down the road, we’ll be looking for, probably, a minor in board game design, and then we’ll see how the industry takes it. It’s all the same thing. Board game design, pen and paper design, is foundational to everything we do digitally. It’s all part of the same education platform.
Above: Danny Bilson (in blue) has held jobs in both games and films.
GamesBeat: It looks like you’ve been thinking a lot about the future at the same time you’re thinking about this current collaboration between the schools.
Bilson: Absolutely. All those pillars or objectives are for the joint program. As a joint program, we have the resources and the people and the talent to go after this kind of growth and improvement to the program. Goal number one was to create and build a solid unified program, and I have to thank both Professor Zyda and Professor Fullerton for all the work they’ve done setting this up, and for the teamwork, we’re going to have going forward. That’s very important. But with this platform, we feel like we can go after these kinds of improvements to the program. We’re number one, but I think there’s a lot more work to do to be number one in the future.
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GamesBeat: Now that you’re one person with the title running USC Games. Was someone else in this role before, or is it a new position?
Bilson: Tracy Fullerton was the director of USC Games previously, but without all the unifying factors that we built into the new organization. They achieved a lot of things. Looking at it as if it was a startup, they published four games as USC Games on PlayStation and Xbox and PC, which is really impressive. They started the ball rolling. We’re picking it up and trying to close all the loops that weren’t closed.
We’re trying to completely function as a joint program. We’re going to move all production into the old EGG Building. We’re going to have a flow of students between the SCI Building and EGG. We’re going to have much more of a flow between the CS students and the cinema students. They’re going to feel like they’re just in one school together. Those things weren’t happening. It’s fulfilling the promise. That’s how I have to look at it. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s the right target as set up by my predecessors, and we’ve hit a milestone now where we can start executing on a bunch of other verticals that are exciting for us.
GamesBeat: How much of the goal is also to enable the students to get a game out while they’re students, as opposed to preparing them for the industry in the future
Bilson: We have an absolute platform for publishing. We have a finish and polish class during the year where students go to take either board games or digital games to market. They get them prepared there, tested and QA’d and all that. We’ve published quite a few games out of that. We also have a bridge program in the summer for some of the more entrepreneurial teams who want to take one of their games they’ve developed in the school. Often it’s one of the AGP games, the capstone production class. Those are the larger-scale games. We prepare them for investment.
There are multiple paths, but the paths to employment are, one, get employed in a studio, or two, start a studio. We do a lot of both. A lot of students want to go the indie route. If they have a small team that wants to stay together after school, the bridge program helps them get funding and get on the way to finishing their game. All of this stuff is important. The reorg is just about done, as far as the official part of it goes. The next part is all about training and paths to employment, and then all the other stuff I talked about.
GamesBeat: Do you think back on a particular game or games from the school as your biggest success so far?
Above: USC’s film school.
Bilson: Every year, out of the 10 large-scale games that we produce, there’s always one or two gems. Last year’s gem was One Hand Clapping, which was a game where you sing into a microphone to move the character in a platformer. It has more than 300,000 downloads from the demo and was picked up by a bunch of YouTube influencers, including PewDiePie. Every year we have a success like that for our students.
Honestly, it tends to be more innovative games. The students who’ve taken a risk and spent a year and a half of their lives producing something that’s more unusual. That’s what they should be doing, I think. Every year we have one that pops. Some of the more famous ones historically, of course, was the stuff Jenova Chen did as a student — Cloud, and ultimately fl0w. Every year there’s another star.
There was one from four or five years ago called House of Cards, by Sam Rosenthal, which is now called Where Cards Fall. That’s in its final months of development, and I believe it’s going to be a big title in mobile for Apple. It looks fantastic. That’s a title I would look for in the near future, which was started in school. I believe it’s going to be published in late summer or early fall. It’s been in development four years and it looks great. Every year there’s a story of a breakout game. I hope that continues.
GamesBeat: Is some of the process that the cinema people come up with an idea for a game, and they have to convince the engineers to come join the project to make it.
Bilson: No, it’s more like — there’s a greenlight process. We’re in the middle of that right now. It happens every spring for the large-scale games we make. We’ll make 10 to 12 of them a year. It’s known as AGP. When you hear that expression, that’s what it’s referring to. We encourage everyone to pitch, and they’re allowed anymore to even form teams. We’re trying to have more students contribute ideas. We absolutely want those ideas to come from every aspect of game development. It could be from an engineer, an artist, a writer, designer. They can become the game director from any discipline, as long as they have an interesting idea.
Ideas are very important, and the diversity of content is very important. We’re right in the middle of that now. This year we have two game directors who are finishing their games. One was an animation student and the other was from the Iovine Academy of Entrepreneurship. They’re both game directors driving teams within USC Games. It’s very inclusive as far as trying to get people who have dreams — they can come from anywhere into the program and build a team and make it if it gets greenlit.
GamesBeat: A lot of that sounds very practical. It’s almost like setting up a mini-industry inside USC.
Bilson: [laughs] I’m only laughing because that’s what it feels like. I’ve been an executive at a couple of game publishers. It feels the same, without the P&L for games. We’re executing the same kind of vision to grow the department as you would to grow an excellent game company. A lot of that — if you start with a portfolio, it’s what we make. The creative portfolio has to be diverse for us to be effective, and I think it is. That starts with diverse students and diverse points of view and diverse creativity. I like to think that’s where we are.
