This interview with me is about 9 months old at this point but I think the article was only published in the early summer. In it I discuss how I broke into the game industry, whether I think QA is a viable way to get into the industry, and my career path up until my job as Lead Analyst at Blue Fang Games. (I’m no longer at Blue Fang but I was at the time of the interview.) Excerpt:
“For me, it’s really a holistic process, and I don’t believe that driving your entire game design through metrics is a good solution. There are a lot of dangers to doing that. Like if you set your goal for the amount of time people spend in your game to be between 10 and 30 minutes, and then you see people who are spending two hours in the game, you might think that’s bad for some reason—it’s an outlier. It’s not what you expected, and you’re thinking something’s wrong with the design. Is the player stuck? Are they unable to read a screen? You need to investigate that, not immediately squash it. People might be spending two hours in the game because they’re taking videos, or maybe they’re choreographing a big dance routine. If your instinct is to just take all the curves and normalize them, you could miss out on a lot of the fun that happens in the outliers of those curves. I’m very much about collecting a lot of data, coming up with the right questions to ask around it, and then using that data to investigate further and further.”
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