He's worked as a professional juggler, a magician's apprentice and a stand-up comedian. He's designed amusement park attractions. He even married a clown.
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Jesse Schell in his new office at CMU, where he's a professor of entertainment technology. Note the souvenir from his previous position with Walt Disney Imagineering on the shelf behind him. (Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette) |
So why would Jesse Schell leave the bright lights of the entertainment world to work on real-time interactive stimulation at Carnegie Mellon University?
Sorry, trick question.
By jumping from Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney's research and development lab in Los Angeles, to CMU's Entertainment Technology Center, the 32-year-old computer scientist isn't changing careers so much as he is locale. Real-time interactive stimulation, after all, is just a euphemism for games -- video games.
"Game design is something I've always taken very seriously," Schell said. Or, at least as seriously as can a guy who, his new CMU office still in disarray, unpacks his juggling pins and Mickey Mouse ears first.
But video games are serious business, by any measure. Last year, U.S. consumers spent $9.4 billion on game software and devices -- more than was spent on movie tickets. Worldwide, the market for videogames totals $28 billion. Microsoft alone says it will spend $2 billion over the next five years to establish its Xbox machine and online game play.
And when the Entertainment Technology Center was created three years ago, the expectation was that the center would devote the bulk of its energies to games, said Don Marinelli, a drama professor and the center's co-director. The reality has been much broader -- virtual reality, applying new technologies to traditional entertainment, audience interactivity and robotics.
It's been so broad, Marinelli added, that now the center needs Schell's skills to shore up its game efforts.
Randy Pausch, a computer scientist and the other co-director, said the center's ambitions for educating game designers nevertheless remain lofty.
"We want to turn out people who will change the world," Pausch said. "Somebody who turns out Doom 7 is not our goal."
In Schell, the pair believe they've found someone already on that leading edge. "He was a pretty big dog at Imagineering," Pausch said, serving as creative director of the lab's Virtual Reality Studio. He was working on Disney's new Internet-based, multiplayer video game and had previously been lead designer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer's Gold, a virtual reality attraction at the DisneyQuest interactive theme park in Orlando, Fla.
Last year, Pirates won a Thea from the Themed Entertainment Association, an improbable award for a virtual reality game, Schell said.
"It was like The Blair Witch Project being named Best Picture," he added.
Game design is in Schell's blood. His mathematician grandfather, Emil Schell, developed the first computer game, Nim, while working on ENIAC, the first electronic computer in 1948. Nim was adapted from an ancient Egyptian game that, like tic-tac-toe, a skilled player can always win by playing first.
"It was a good way to convince generals of the intelligence of computers," he explained.
Schell's parents loved old movies and would haul him to the library on weekends to watch old W.C. Fields flicks, but otherwise the family didn't have any particular link to entertainment. Yet as he grew up in Danville, N.J. and, as a teen, in Springfield, Mass., Schell was enthralled by entertainers. During high school, he worked weekends and summers as a juggler at a nearby amusement park. His high school sweetheart and future wife, Nyra, worked as a clown at the same park.
He also had gigs with a magician and as a comedian; it was a good way for a student to work his way through school. But he never expected to make a living that way. Yet as he pursued a degree in computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he found that his studies on artificial intelligence drew him into storytelling projects.
Upon graduation, he joined Bell Communications Research to work on natural language programs and his Bellcore bosses ultimately sent him to Carnegie Mellon to get a master's degree in information networking. "That's when I got into virtual reality," working on a virtual art museum project. Once he got back to Bellcore, he learned of an opportunity at Disney's VR Studio.
"Two weeks later, I was out in California working there," he recalled.
That was seven years ago. He worked on a number of virtual reality attractions for DisneyQuest, culminating in the Pirates attraction. Inspired loosely by Disney World's Pirates of the Caribbean ride, the attraction casts four players as a crew of a pirate ship. While one player acts as captain, piloting the ship, the other three players run between six cannons, firing at other pirates and serpents that appear on projection screens surrounding the ship's rocking deck.
With the growing popularity of the Internet, however, online games have become a focus of the VR Studio.
"Disneyland wouldn't have been possible without the freeway system in California," Schell said. "In the '70s, affordable air travel made Disney World possible. Now, with the Internet, everybody in the world can go a zillion miles an hour," so destinations can now go online.
For the past three years, Schell worked on Toontown Online, a multiplayer game that enlists players to become cartoon characters who defend their town from evil robots called Cogs. The players communicate with each other through word balloons and battle the robots by using cartoon weapons such as cream pies and seltzer bottles.
During the shakedown testing, the developers had hoped to get 200 or 300 players to sign up. "After 20,000 signups, our network was a little overwhelmed," said Schell, who continues to consult with Imagineering. Disney has not announced a release date for the final version.
Though designed for children ages 7-12, "we've been surprised to find that adults seem to enjoy it as much as the kids," he said, making it a game that families would want to play together. "Of course, we come from the theme park mentality -- if the kids and parents aren't having fun together, you're probably doing it wrong," he added.
Ultimately, what makes a game successful is the same thing that makes a movie successful -- getting the players, or the audience, to identify with the characters and anticipate their choices. The difference is that, in a movie such as Star Wars, a viewer might think of how he would react in Luke Skywalker's place; in a game, the player could actually act on those impulses.
Schell will be teaching a course on game design. "A lot of people think they would like to design games because they like to play games," he said. "That's like saying, 'Hey, I like taking baths, so maybe I'll become a plumber.'"
As with most things in the entertainment field, creating a game requires a team approach, combining the talents of artists and engineers. "That was the model of the VR Studio and it was certainly the model of Walt Disney," Schell said. And it's also the model of the Entertainment Technology Center, which is a joint project of CMU's drama and computer science departments.
"This is the premier place in the world," Schell said of the center. The students are drawn from both the arts and from engineering, but all of them selected for their ability, or willingness, to work in teams. "At Disney, I've been taking them as interns for several years and they're just far and away better than interns we get from different programs."
Students shouldn't expect a lot of computer programming talk in his class. "It's all about risk, reward, balancing chance and player skill, the psychology of the player. Really, all of that has little to do with the technology."
Byron Spice can be reached at bspice@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578.
