Cross-Tisch: World-Building - Play Music, Play Games

TOPIC

Graduate Musical Theatre Writing and the Game Center have established a productive relationship in which students go through a variety of workshops during their theses projects, some of which include tackling the shows they're working on from the point of view of another medium. This past academic year, we included a two-day world building workshop for videogames for musical theatre students, which helps them understand the narrative or their shows from a fresh viewpoint,  as well as introducing students to transmedia storytelling. We'll talk about the points in common between musical theatre and games, and how we've managed to make this into a successful collaboration.

SPEAKERS

Clara Fernandez-Vara is a game scholar, designer and writer. Her area of expertise is narrative in games and how storytelling can integrate with game design, which she has explored both in games for research and in the commercial sphere. Her first book, Introduction to Game Analysis, has been published by Routledge.

Robert Lee is a lyricist and librettist whose original musicals include Journey to the West (music by Leon Ko), Heading East (music by Ko) and The Sweet By and By (book and music by Maria V.S. Seigenthaler). He and Ko received a Richard Rodgers Development Award for Heading East and an AT&T First Stage Grant for the musical Chinese Hell, developed with producer Margo Lion and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.