A Passion for Games

I’ve been playing games for as long as I can remember. Well, actually, I do remember some bits. In 1987, I got my first Nintendo Entertainment System as a Christmas gift. It was love at first sight.

Console after console before moving onto computer gaming and the Internet, I’ve played a lot of games over the years and my favorites are as etched into my being as anything you’d find in pop culture. I’ve always been told that I wouldn’t get anywhere in life by playing games, and I think deep down I started to believe it. But I was fortunate to find my calling in design some years later and making a career out of it.

A Passion for Design

As a user experience designer, I relished the role of being a designer for the people. I was inspired to create products and services that would have some meaning in the lives of its users. The desire to be successful doing this, and my appetite to continue learning, led me back to school to study interaction design.

While studying in the Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts, I became acutely aware of my capabilities as a designer. While I wasn’t sure where I’d end up, I knew I was doing what I enjoyed, and that the discovery of what interested me most would come in time. Sure enough, it was while figuring out what my thesis project would be that I realized I could merge the two things in my life that I genuinely felt passionate about – games and design.

Interaction Design, Game Design, and the Future

Now that I’ve come full circle in making a career out of games and design, I aim to further refine my skills in both interaction design and game design. It’s my goal to have a role in blurring the line that currently separates the two disciplines—not so much as to make the two indistinguishable—but rather to adopt practices found in one discipline in the other. I want to discover ways to bring games into our lives to solve real world problems.