Meeting Scott Kim

I drove up to Half Moon Bay today to meet Scott Kim, puzzle game designer. Self-described as a "math teacher" in disguise, Scott creates puzzles for magazines and various organizations including Stanford. I had an awesome time discovering his design process and learning about the business of freelance game design. He gave me one of his games, Railroad Rush hour, and left me with a few gems that I would like to sum here.

Design

• Make it a good toy first. People should want to play with your game before even knowing how it works.


• Learning should be deliecious and nutrious


• Video game design has made a significant contribution to gaming in general through the use of levels. They reall nailed it.


• Games really support education. It's behavirorial learning


• It can't look like math. Make it wasy for mainstream audiences, no numbers.


• Create a niche. Do something different.


• Design puzzles that test several frames of mind: spatial, taxonomies, and kinesthetic

Tools
Scott uses a variey of tools on his Mac laptop.

• Omni Outliner - keeps track of his day


• Flash


• Illustrator


• Quark


• word


• Go Live

Process
To design a game, Scott goes through the following steps:

1. Research - calls friends, does lots of reading


2. Brainstorm - how can I design it so they are learning the theory? How can I constrain the problem? How do I make it fun?


3. Build - Scott does all the art and sets up the flash and sends everything to a flash programmer.


4. Test - He sends the puzzle to a SME (subject matter expert) and he has a QA website. He basically invites the complainers to test his future puzzles. Disrupters are always part of a community. He's given disrupters a role.


5. Send to Editor - magazine editors test the puzzles and ready it for publishing. Scott can even do the layout for them.


6. Publish - the game is delivered via print, web and/or box.

Leads
Scott left me with a few interesting leads to explore. I was exploring customer service games using massively multiplayer worlds. FedEx is a huge customer for service learning. I could observe what they do. There.com is working for the military now to design presumably learning games. Tom O'brien is a great educational game designer. A good book to pick up is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Also check out Martin Gardner, he was a guy that developed puzzles by taking cutting edge research and reframing them into games. While I was there I also met with his wife A.J. Kim and got her perspective on being a woman game designer. I will stay in touch with them both. They inspired me to keep down this road. Maybe one day I'll host a student from the Stanford shadow program at my house near the beach.