Lee Sheldon
Lee Sheldon (CFA’72) of Glendale, Mass., writes, “I received my MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1974. I had a 20-year career in television as a writer/producer—over 200 scripts produced, everything from staff writer on Charlie’s Angels to writer/producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and head writer of the daytime soapEdge of Night. For the past 23 years, I’ve been writing and designing video games (both applied, serious games and entertainment games) and wrote a book about how to do it: Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Course Technology, 2013), now in its second edition. I also design classes as games, and wrote a book about that:The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Cengage, 2011). My current entertainment video game,The Lion’s Song (for PC, Mac, iOS, Android), follows the interconnected stories of four characters struggling to overcome creative hurdles in Vienna, Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century. My latest class designed as an alternate reality game (ARG) went live on September 14, 2017, at California Polytechnic State University. It was funded by a National Science Foundation grant. The premise: 60 students in two sections of a cybersecurity class fought off attacks on the school’s servers by a determined hacker who also may have been targeting the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant—hacker videos, fake websites (including the dark web), field trips, and a kidnapped TA. Much fun! And learning…”
From the Winter-Spring 2018 issue.