2020 has given me the opportunity to rediscover my love for video games. A hobby (read: addiction) I pursued relentlessly in high school, once I started college I began exploring other interests. With less and less free time, I stopped playing as many games.
I've since graduated college and started working as a product manager. My life became user stories, wireframes, and story points. I dedicated myself to uncomplicating; to unboxing complex problems and offering simple solutions. I garnered a hatred of push doors with handles and began noticing other design choices, good and bad, everywhere around me. It's in this context that I started gaming again.
And I'll be honest: I played a LOT of video games this past year. While some kept themselves busy during quarantine learning to knit or nursing their sourdough starter, I studied the game. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice; and many other games with colons in their title. Some were fantastic, some were fantastically frustrating. And once I put down the controller, it wasn't gameplay, or graphics, or story elements that I appreciated most—it was menu design.
Otherwise great games can be marred by frustrating design choices, and the best-designed interfaces are often so intuitive they are overlooked by reviewers. It's a shame that user experience is not given more attention in game reviews, especially given how much work goes into it. With this blog, I've decided to right this wrong by magnifying game design through the lens of a product manager. To give interfaces—a feature present in almost every modern game—the spotlight they so rightfully deserves.
And it justifies the hundreds of hours I spent in front of a television, which is a bonus.
Project Charter
This blog is a project like any other, and needs a charter to guide it. In the spirit of simplicity, here it is:
Provide enjoyment for the target audience (Jake Bone).
Today, that means writing about video games. Tomorrow, I might decide to turn this into a cocktail blog, or a travel blog, or an anything-I-want blog. I might post every week or every month, or never again—the beauty of this charter is that I'm not beholden to anything except my own enjoyment. For now, I'm just happy this blog exists at all!