Bryan Singh:  I’m a technical game designer here at thatgamecompany and what that means is I do a lot of mechanics design and implementation, level design and implementation, and programming and engineering. I’m part of that bridge between the engineering and design disciplines.

Bryan: I’ve worked here for almost two years now. I started here June of 2009, at the beginning of Journey.

Bryan:  I’ve actually asked myself this a lot of times. I like doing a lot of stuff and I don’t know if I do consider myself restricted to games. Growing up, games have always been around and they’ve had an impact on me, so that’s what I’ve grabbed onto.

I think thatgamecompany chose games because we’re one of the first generations to have grown up with digital games and we are seeing how much they can affect people. We want to help make games that affect people in the right way.

Bryan:  Everyone has the same hours.  Our core hours are about 10:30-7. We start a little bit late – that’s kind of the norm for the games industry.   As far as pushing nonstop until it’s done, we try very consciously not to do that. We really strongly believe that if something’s not done on time, killing yourself to try to get it done just won’t produce quality work.

gamesauce recently sat down with our producer extraordinaire, Robin Hunicke, and discussed what it’s like working with emotions, and how she strives to be great at what she does. (We think she is. Pretty great, that is.)

“‘Just try to make everyone’s experience positive and creative and without friction,’ she suggests. ‘Obviously, one person can’t do that. A producer alone can’t make the working experience smooth and efficient and joyous, but one should try as best as they can. A lot of that is having conversations about areas where skills can be developed, how behaviors can be improved or just giving someone positive feedback about doing something really fantastic.’”

“‘What I strive to do every day, is to leave the office having made a measurable impact on everyone’s work experience. That could be anything from organizing a meeting about a feature I think needs help to ordering a whiteboard and helping someone hang it up so their ideas can be expressed more freely than being scrawled on little pieces of paper.’”

http://gamesauce.org/news/2010/09/07/robin-hunicke-on-working-with-feeling-how-to-be-a-great-producer/

Jenova Chen’s talk at the Develop Conference in Brighton was featured in an article on Gamasutra.

“Feelings make the game, says thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen. “If the feelings that you provide in your game are unique, then your game will be unique,” said the Flower developer’s creative director and co-founder at Develop in Brighton.”

Read the full article here.

via Speaking of Faith

Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play, says that pleasurable, purposeless activity prevents violence and promotes trust, empathy, and adaptability to life’s complication.  Play games – they’re good for you!

Listen to the radio program here.

This is a presentation I gave at the GamesBeat09 conference hosted by VentureBeat. The topic is about the future of video games. Unfortunately, my presentation was interrupted. Therefore I recorded a version afterward to satisfy the people who are interested to hear the ending.

However, this is the first time I tried to add my narration to my slides. There were so many technical issues happened during the making of this video. So if you hear sound glitches (some are pretty long), please bear with me. In addition, this was suppose to be a 8 minutes talk. However, I spent 20 minutes trying to elaborate each slides to more details which made the talk too long to watch : {