Dear USC Games Family,
Based on feedback from students, faculty and industry guests, we at USC Games are proud to announce the first annual Winteractive Festival!
Being held on Wednesday December 7th, this festival will combine all of our winter showcases (Demo Day, the MFA thesis show, and the underground show) into one fantastic, curated event! This inclusive, polished winter showcase will give students from across the university the chance to have their best work seen by industry professionals, faculty, alumni and peers.
A Curated Festival
The Winteractive Festival will be be a curated showcase for the best of all of the variety of work that USC Games has to offer from across a broader spectrum of platforms, classes and levels of experimentation.
Things that will stay the same: we will still be holding one on one interviews and offering ad hoc tables for industry recruiters at this winter event. But this year, anyone who submits a game will be eligible to submit a resume to the one on one interview process. (You asked for it, we delivered!) And, never fear, the “big” Demo Day in Spring and the final MFA thesis show will both still remain the same.
So, first step to being part of this great new event is to submit your game. We’ll be inviting a wide array of public and industry professionals, so this is a great opportunity to get your work seen. And we are looking for a wide range of projects to show them.
Bring out your board games! Bring your hardcore multiplayer games! Bring your VR explorations! Bring your deep narrative content! Bring your experimental play! If you made it, if you’re proud of it, and you haven’t had an event like this on campus to show at, it should be in Winteractive. Be it analogue, digital, hybrid, augmented – we want to see it. Whatever class you made it in, whatever program you’re in, that doesn’t matter.
Submit Your Work
Should you submit something? YES OF COURSE YOU SHOULD. And here is where you’re going to do it:
FILL OUT THIS FORM and SUBMIT TO WINTERACTIVE
We highly encourage you to not put this off and at least look at the form right now so you know what you need to prepare.
The Winteractive Festival is a festival, and we’ve designed this process to give you some more practice at submitting to festivals. This is why you are being asked for more than just a working copy of the game. Submissions will need to include basic press materials we can use to send to our alumni, industry partners, and potential press contacts.
As a bonus: if you can get these materials together, you will have most everything you need to adopt Rami Ismail’s presskit() http://dopresskit.com/ – you’ll need it the rest of professional lives anyway.
Call for Submissions
The Winteractive Festival is seeking work in two major categories: “Polished & Complete” and “Playable In-Progress.” If you made it as a final project in a class last semester, built it for a jam or Dare to Be Digital over the summer, or have been slowly perfecting something in your free time, that’s what we mean by “Polished & Complete.” It needs to run smoothly in the hands of a visitor without going ‘splode.
If you’re working on something THIS semester and you can tell it’s going to be awesome but it’s not quite done yet, it could qualify as “Playable In-Progress.”
Because The Winteractive Festival will be open to the public, the ratio of finished-to-in-progress projects shown is going to tilt towards finished. We’re looking to help you put your best foot forward. This show is also going to be a curated show with feedback from across the USC Games community. This means Winteractive isn’t just a “Top 20” – Winteractive is about showing the range and breadth of the talent in our student body. If you’re not sure if you should submit something to Winteractive in other words, you absolutely should.
Stay tuned for more details. Submissions are open NOW and run through OCTOBER 21.
Please direct all questions to: winteractive@cinema.usc.edu
Game On,
The Winteractive Festival Chairs