Jesse Schell is CEO of Schell Games and a professor at the Entertainment Technology Center.
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Schell Games builds games that change players for the better

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 20 min

The video game industry is full of companies that make sequels and derivative titles. But Schell Games was started by game design professor Jesse Schell to make transformational games — or those that can change players for the better.

It’s pretty ambitious to think that a video game can change your life — like a work of art, such as a movie, a book, or a song. But Schell’s company is different, like its founder, a former circus performer and stand-up comedian who has given many entertaining speeches in his career. Schell wrote the award-winning book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.