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Credit: Courtesy of Jenova Chen
Jenova Chen, 26
Gaming with the flow
Thatgamecompany
Jenova Chen has been playing video games for 20 years, and he's desperate to see something new: right now, he says, most games focus on stimulating players by inciting aggression. "I want to expand what a video game can be," he says. So as a graduate student in interactive media at the University of Southern California, Chen looked to psychologist Mihály Csikszentmihályi's theory of "flow," which identifies a state of focus that people find enjoyable and fulfilling. Chen uses the theory's principles to design games that offer just enough challenge--not so little that players become bored, not so much that they become anxious.
Chen's first effort was FlOw, a Web-based "Zen game" in which players control a sea creature that swims, eats, and evolves. After graduating in 2006, Chen cofounded Thatgamecompany to continue his work. The company released a PlayStation 3 version of FlOw in 2007; it has become one of the most downloaded games on the PlayStation Network. The next game, Flower, will be released later this year. By going with the flow, Chen may help video games reach a whole new audience. --Erica Naone
2008 TR35 Winners
Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Building immersive 3-D environments
Dries Buytaert
Simple, flexible Web publishing
Jenova Chen
Gaming with the flow
Tanzeem Choudhury
Inferring social networks automatically
Jack Dorsey
Personal updates made simple
Stefanus Du Toit
Programming for parallel processors
Seth Hallem
Deconstructing software to find bugs
Xian-Sheng Hua
Enhancing video search
Sundar Iyer
Making memory at Internet speed
Farinaz Koushanfar
Locking microchips to prevent piracy
Johnny Lee
Streamlining human-computer interactions
Meredith Ringel Morris
Searching websites jointly
Andrew Ng
Building household robots
Adam Smith
Making sense of e-mail madness
JB Straubel
Engineering electric sports cars
Eric Wilhelm
Putting DIY projects online
Robert Wood
Building robotic flies