Heather Chaplin highlights the duo behind thatgamecompany, creators of the popular flOw and Flower.

BY HEATHER CHAPLIN

Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen met at the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media Division. Santiago was an NYU graduate looking for new technologies to use in experimental theater; Chen was looking for a way to pursue his art rather than becoming a computer engineer as his parents wished. They got to know each other when Santiago, who hadn’t ever imagined becoming a videogame designer, volunteered on a game of Chen’s. They soon found themselves staying up late, working hard, and imagining a company that made a different kind of video game.

It’s two years later and Santiago and Chen are still working together, but instead of USC students, they’re president and creative director, respectively, of thatgamecompany, which indeed makes a different kind of video game. In fact their most recent game, Flower, establishes Santiago and Chen as a new breed of game designer:They’re young, they went to game design school and they have no doubts that games are a legitimate mode of creative expression.

I first met Santiago when I tracked her down at the annual Game Developers Conference in 2007. The buzz around Santiago and Chen’s school projects, games called Cloud and flOw, had become so incessant among indie game designers that you wouldn’t have been able to ignore it unless you were deaf. And maybe not even then. And for good reason: In Cloud, you’re a little boy in a hospital bed, looking out the window and dreaming of flying through the clouds. As you fly, you realize you can move the clouds around, replacing dark rainy clouds with white fluffy ones. In flOw you simply move around the screen as a beautiful abstract creature made of shapes, swallowing other beautiful abstract creatures made of shapes. There’s no winning or losing, just the fact of floating around. Both games were so unusual, so relaxing, that people coined a new genre name for describing them: Zen games.

John Hight of Sony Santa Monica, who signed the duo to their much talked-of, straight-out-of-school, three-game deal, still remembers seeing Cloud for the first time. He was at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, and he needed to find small games for the downloadable Internet service on Sony’s soon-to-be-launched Playstation 3. He decided to check out the conference’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop, which had student game selections. “Honestly, my expectations weren’t too high,” he told me recently. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and the kiosks set up to show the games had been abandoned during lunch time. He was thinking, “yeah, yeah,” and listening to the typical shooting sounds, when he saw Cloud, started playing, and knew that he had found something totally different.

“It wasn’t like any game I’d played before,” Hight said. “I called up Tracy Fullerton [Santiago and Chen’s advisor at USC] and said, ‘What the hell, Tracy! Why didn’t you tell me about this?’”

Fullerton set up a meeting, and by the time graduation came along, Santiago and Chen had formed thatgamecompany with a few other USC graduates and been signed by Sony, much to the astonishment (and understandable jealousy) of other gamemakers.

Since then thatgamecompany has reworked flOw into a 3D Playstation Network game (it was originally an online Flash game) and created Flower.

Flower is built on a three-act structure like a movie but with only emotion as an arc. No people, no plot. You start as a stream of petals in the wind, breezing through endless fields of grass and making flowers bloom when you brush past them. That’s the first three levels — the joy of flying, the magic of making these gorgeously-colored, glowing flowers bloom. Then, on level five, around three-quarters of the way through the game, there’s a twist. The landscape turns dark and stormy, and you find yourself navigating around collapsing electrical towers that loom menacingly against a night sky. Shocks char your petal stream if you get too close. You find yourself feeling uneasy as you play. You wonder what happened to the long, lovely fields of grass. Then in the last level you fly back to the city bringing color to gray buildings and green grass to open spaces.

“The game is about nature and urban life and creating a harmony between the two,” Chen said. Chen also told me he’d never had been able to make the game if it hadn’t been for USC — more specifically, if the USC Interactive Media Division hadn’t been housed in the School of Cinematic Arts and its curriculum influenced by its host.

“I would never have been able to come up with this kind of design if I hadn’t been around the film school,” he said.

This is where Tracy Fullerton, Chen and Santiago’s adviser and the director of the Game Innovation Lab at USC’s Interactive Media Division, comes back into the picture.

“Every experience we have with a medium is going to give us some feeling of emotion,” Fullerton told me. “By having the Interactive Media Division within the School of Cinematic Arts, what we’re essentially saying is we’re interested in the emotions, the stories, the expressive potential of games as a form of communication.”

Chen said it was through reading movie scripts — part of the Interactive Media Division curriculum — that he got the idea for Flower’s arc of emotions. “Before I came to USC, I was just a guy who liked games and made them for a hobby,” he said. Being exposed to different modes of storytelling, no matter what the particular medium, opened him up to doing sophisticated, experimental work like Flower.

And that kind of gets to the heart of the matter. Gamemakers like Chen and Santiago are a new breed — no generation before had a game-design school to go to. Wanna-be gamemakers taught themselves and for the most part used other games as inspiration. But people like Chen and Santiago were trained as artists, learning both their own craft as game-makers and how to think and act creatively, unbound by the specifics of gamemaking. Raised on Nintendo, they have no conflict over seeing games as a mode of creative expression, and a school like USC teaches them how to act on that instinct. That’s good news all around for the game industry.