Lauren Goldberg is currently working with a team designing for electronic games MIDWAY GAMES a division of MIDWAY Bally Interview by Bart Brejcha


You worked for companies like Tyco & Milton Bradley?

I started at Breslow Terzian.

You are currently on a team designing electronic games for Midway Games(a division of Midway Bally.) And you work with programmers and artists, some of whom were on the design team for Joust. How did you first get interested in toys?

Back in my senior year in college, I read an article on Marvin Glass, a think- tank in Chicago that officially broke up in the late 80's. The two companies that broke off were BMT and Mayer Glass. My goal was to work for Marvin Glass. I applied there but never got the chance to work there. I got to do my dream and work for BMT.

How did you go from the toy industry to the electronic game industry?

From BMT, I ended up at TYCO. There I started by designing collectable miniature dolls for the TV promo ploy. (Definitely something you could buy from Toys-R-Us.) From there I ended up at Milton Bradley, where I started designing games such has the Magic School Bus. The client sent us a CD ROM.

A marketing person at Milton Bradley and I were exploring a CD ROM that Scholastic sent us. We were both inspired. That was 1992. One of the executives was about to leave to Parker Brothers. The day he was leaving, I was in his office asking him for a job. Hasboro interactive was sharing a building with Milton Bradley. The timing was not good, and I did not get the job and shortly afterwards I went to Chicago.

I applied at Midway and by chance the company had a product where they liked my female point of view. This company has traditionally built games for men. They felt that by bringing a woman on the team they would be able to enhance the appeal of their products to women; the other 50% of the population.

SCHOOL:


How would someone get into the video game industry?

My background is in fine art and sculpture. My Masters is in product design. Having a product design and sculpture degree are strong backgrounds for the toy industry. If you want to get into toys, I would highly recommend an ID degree. FIT in New York City has a program for toy design. People who go to FIT get jobs in the industry.

Would you say FIT is one of the top schools for toy design?

FIT offers things like fabric making. The typical ID student focuses on plastics for example.

Board games?

I am a good board game designer because I played those board games as a kid. There is a school in Washington State that has a program specifically for board game design. Many schools now focus on 3D animation for electronic games. Typically most of the companies don't go out to hire game designers. Most people migrate up to game designer. One other person on my team is also a degreed product designer who came from the toy industry. We are not programmers but now are game designers. We have an understanding of programming just as an Industrial Designer has an understanding of engineering.

Why does one have to enter the game design profession in a related job and move up in the ranks? Is it because that skills in game design are difficult to quantify?

Maybe you're right. I was hired as a game designer, but perhaps that is because I had been designing games for years and had several to my name. I was hired at MB as a senior product developer but in the end they found I was very good at designing games. Most games are plastic toys, even board games, and they thought I would be doing more of that, but they found that I could develop a strategy for the game from beginning to end.

I am sure you work with a wide variety of people in your office in Chicago. Do you find that most people working around you have a degree?

Ah, let's see.... I would say yes, but the company doesn't entirely focus on whether you have a degree or not. I think if you start out to finish a degree and don't, you will falter when you apply for a management level position. If it comes down to you and a competitor with a degree, they will the win the position. When I was at MB the president of the company didn't have a degree. He was no genius, but he could successfully lead the company.

What degree is most common?

Obviously, a lot of computer science degrees, and many of the artists have a fine arts background. The animators sometimes have focused art degrees, etc. At MB one of the directors had a psych degree; he was a very effective game designer. He was a passionate collector of games as well.

Are you a collector of games?

My collection is nothing compared to his.

Do you wish you had a stronger sense of Business?

Coming from the toy industry, my background is based on invention. Many of my toys at Tyco were based on TV marketing campaigns, where at MB they were almost all licensed products from Disney and the like. I was always working with marketing people, and there were always guidelines to consider. I learned a lot from my marketing people. People always complain about how horrible marketing people are, but mine were excellent. When you are working with a marketing person and you are told that your game has to sit in this size box and you look at them like they are crazy. Then they tell you that all the games in this size box cost this much, and if your box is that size plus five dollars, the consumers are going to think they are getting ripped off.

Where did you go to school and what advantages did advantages did that school offer you?

Well, the degree? Or every school? I transferred a lot, but I graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The grad degree came from UIC. The Art Institute people complain about their education, but I still use many of the creative skills that I learned there. An artist can be a great craftsman with woodworking skills, or drawing skills, but mental skills are invaluable to me. That is where my creativity comes from. It's hard to explain where that comes from. That creative problem solving crosses many professions and the Art Institute really developed that in me. In art school, you are solving personal problems, but in design school you learn to solve public problems. You need to learn to design for someone other than yourself who has needs other than yourself. Grad school was also very good for me because of how it taught me how to research. We had a two-year research project, and those methods apply strongly to game design as well.

Are you interested in other aspects of design?

In grad school, I focused on ergonomics which I feel is the same as interface design. I am also a graphic designer in a way because it is very difficult to develop a game without working out some visuals. If you aren't working with a programmer many of the art duties fall on the game designer to mock up the projects, so I am involved with that as well.

Speaking of computers, what computer tools do you use?

Obviously Photoshop, a bit of Illustrator. 3D Studio Max, Premier, and sometimes Debabelizer. A lot of our games need to have the palettes adjusted. We use a couple of in-house programs developed specifically for our company. But primarily Photoshop, Illustrator, and 3D Studio Max.

Do you have a mentor and how might they have influenced your design process?

That's tough. I don't know if I have ever had one mentor. At Tyco, I learned a great deal from my cost engineer. At BMT I worked very closely with another woman and we clicked well. At MB my director was incredible. MB was a very unusual place. If you had three groups working, you always had to go to other groups to get your games tested. You had these game designers working for 10-15 years that were just amazing. I don't know if I really had a mentor, but there have been many people that I have learned a great deal from. That's why I prefer a team mentality, because if you get too close to your project you might lose perspective on what the pros and cons are. They were always there to say "What's with this rule? You aren't making any sense!" I forgot to mention the product that I'm working on, it's called Touch Master. It's interesting to design games for this platform because things must be very intuitive. If you are in a bar and you've been drinking, you don't want to read rules, you want to kick back and relax, rather than reading a screen of rules. In a board game, when you get stuck you refer to the rules, but when people are spending a quarter, they don't tend to read anything because they think that pressing the help button is costing them valuable playing time.

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