Hi, everybody,
Thanks for setting up this forum. I'm very eager to learn and contribute.
My game design background started because Wisconsin summers are hot and muggy. My 4 siblings and I escaped the heat as young children by inventing and playing games in the basement. One game involved pretending to run our own businesses (mine was an ice cream shop): we corralled areas of the basement with chairs and blankets, then took turns receiving services and pretending to pay one another. It was like "Pretend Playhouse" with a fair bit of Monopoly thrown in. Another game involved laying out wooden blocks and toy vehicles to create fictitious cities, where we imagined ourselves travelling in the little cars as they drove around town.
At age 10 or so, my first board game--created with crayons and cuttings from an old cardboard box--was an uninspiring knock-off of Axis & Allies. Board game design took a hiatus throughout my high school and college, as I spent my time instead on programming arcade scrollers. And then, for 20 years, I created no games except in my head while I pursued a career as a software developer and as a professor of computer science.
During that period, I experienced the rise of Euro-style games as a player. My favorites typically involve engine-building. Games like Scythe and Waterdeep get under my skin (especially when players create shared engines benefiting each other). I can't stop thinking about the mechanisms and opportunities to innovate on them. In the past year, I began to create prototypes that friends and I play. I enjoy the process of testing and refinement of my games as much as I do when creating software. Moreover, as my own mind has increasingly focused on game design, I see in society a rising need for positive interactions among friends and families--precisely the kinds of joyful experiences that tabletop games can create.
In August 2020, this month, I left my job in academia to pursue a career of creating software, games, and software games. My focus will be on designing tabletop games for traditional/physical media as well as current and future tabletop simulators.
I have no reputation as a game designer. I have stayed low-profile on social media to help keep my personal and public lives separate as a professor. I have never sold a game. What I bring is games, a commitment to iterative innovation and improvement, 30 years of experience creating interactivity, and a passion to bring joy to players. There's a lot that I still have to learn, so I'm eager to participate in these forums.
-Chris
Yes, it was totally by choice. Tenured professor-ing was getting a little uninteresting and disjoint from actually doing programming. So I'm doing software, games and software games. Writing software pays the bills.