For a growing number of UChicago alumni, video games aren’t just a pastime—they’re a profession.
Tableau spoke with three Humanities alumni about their work in the games industry. Noor Amin, SB’23 (Media Arts and Design, Neuroscience), is a game designer at Riot Games, where she works on the online battle arena game League of Legends. Kellie Lu, LAB’16, AB’20 (Psychology and Creative Writing), AM’21 (Master of Arts Program in the Humanities), is a game developer at the education-focused studio Filament Games. Eren Slifker, AB’24 (Media Arts and Design, Music), is a software engineer at Ares Interactive, whose titles include Heroes vs Hordes, an app-based role-playing game.
What was the first game you played growing up that made a strong impression on you?
Slifker: I’m not sure I can limit it to just one game. The game system, certainly, that had the biggest impression on me was the Wii. It was a huge part of my childhood. I have so many fond memories of coming home from school, and the first thing I wanted to do was to play tennis in Wii Sports or fly around an island in Wii Sports Resort or explore a galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy. I think about the experience of that console over any one game.
Lu: I loved diving deep into The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. That game was unafraid to be totally weird, with unreliable quest givers who would lie to you and naked axmen looking for humiliated revenge. It was deep enough to compare notes with my best friend and play alongside each other. Nowadays, I still enjoy playing single-player games sitting beside someone else.
When did you start to realize you could make a career in games?
Slifker: It came in stages. I remember designing a really weird, inside jokey board game with a friend of mine in fifth grade. The desire has been there for as long as I can remember.
At UChicago it started solidifying for me that it was something I could turn into a career. In the summer of 2023, I got a Metcalf grant to hire other students as interns and create a game studio, where, over the course of 10 weeks, we all worked together and created a game that was released on Steam. Through that, I realized, maybe I can actually do this for real.
Amin: It was [William Rainey Harper Professor] Patrick Jagoda’s Critical Videogame Studies class, which I took in the first quarter of my first year of college. The hyperanalytical lens Patrick applies to creative thought, not just to games—it felt like he was speaking my language. I studied neuroscience, along with media arts and design, and the way he thinks through problems felt really native to me. It made me realize I could merge the creative side of me with the analytical side.
Lu: I also took Critical Videogame Studies. It was toward the end of my time in undergrad, and I hadn’t found a career path that satisfied me. The premise of the class was to read video games like they were books. That was the first time I realized games could be taken seriously. The design exercises let me express my creativity, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the analysis.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
Amin: League of Legends, the game I work on, is played by a hundred million people. Being able to think through an audience that big and that diverse is exciting to me. There’s an aspect of developing my own intuition about the audience and an aspect of looking at data to understand player behaviors. It’s almost like looking at a large-scale human psychology experiment, and that’s really rewarding, especially as someone with a neuroscience background.
Lu: Because my studio does educational games, I learn something new with every game. I also build different skills—one game might need 3D level design, another might need a Japanese role-playing game design skill set. The people I work with and the supportive environment have also helped me grow my skills in an environment that is open to mistakes.
What’s something about working in games that tends to surprise people outside the industry?
Lu: At my studio, I do almost no coding or technical work.
I narrow uncertainty for people very often. There are many instances where I have to say, well, we can’t have 20 choices, but we need more than 5—how’s 15?
Also, since almost everyone has design opinions, part of my job as the primary or sole designer on each team is to manage people’s opinions. It’s a balance to cultivate good ideas and figure out which not to keep.
Amin: When I tell people I’m a designer, they think I, like, sit around and smoke a cigarette and say words in French, and then a game comes out of my brilliant artiste mind. That’s really not it. It’s very close to the scientific process—we have a hypothesis and then test it against our audience and then revisit the hypothesis.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to work in games?
Slifker: Make more things. Seriously. I think the biggest thing that led to me finding a place in this industry was just making stuff. And you have to not just start a million things but finish them as well. The act of going through the creative motions of starting and finishing something is such a big deal, because you learn not to be precious about it being perfect. You learn so much about your own creative proclivities, what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, and how you can structure things to facilitate your own ability to continue and finish projects. Putting in the reps and understanding yourself as a creative who is finishing stuff—I think that’s the biggest thing.