Brains@Play

The Brains@Play Initiative was originally founded as a transdisciplinary research project at the University of Southern California.

The initiative was coordinated by Garrett Flynn with support from faculty advisors, including:

• Marientina Gotsis: Founder and Director of the USC Games For Health Initiative
• Dong Song: Director of the USC Neural Modeling and Interface Laboratory
• Dimitris Grammenos: Principal Researcher at ICS-FORTH

Together, we ran an international design fiction competition, hosted a virtual event on the ethical and social implications of emerging neurotechnology, and even led a high school course on brain-computer interfaces.

Brains@Play LLC was organized by Garrett Flynn and Joshua Brewster at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic to develop low-cost biosensing hardware and browser-based BCI applications.We built a considerable amount of open-source software, particularly the Brains@Play Platform.

Following disputes between Garrett and Josh about proper professional conduct and a lack of alignment on future business decisions, Brains@Play LLC was dissolved in September 2023.

A few mistakes stood out as key contributors to the company's failure:

1. Coupling our software roadmap to ambitious hardware goals that ultimately were never realized.
2. Focusing on developer tools rather than our core product.
3. Working diligently without a clear business model and sustainable funding through contracts, grants, or community support.

A complete archive of our work is available on GitHub and a full summary of our work was published in August 2023 following Garrett's graduation from the MA in Media Arts, Games, and Health program.