We spend three years working on it, to come up with cool innovative ideas that will compel people to fork over the money and go on a ride. With games, you make or break your sale with every single person who comes to the store, picks up your box and tries to decide if it's a game worth playing. People have a misconception that when you become a video game designer you play games all day. What are misconceptions that new designers might have? The game should quickly become an extension of their own ego, so they're no longer fighting the controls, but just doing it: flying the plane, doing cool moves, trying to shoot down the guy in front of them, and feeling like they accomplished something. It's also hard to balance the difficulty level so that the game rewards people who gain expertise, but isn't so hard that people become frustrated and stop playing. Getting to that point in designing a game is challenging. When you listen to a group of people who just played a fun multiplayer game together, it sounds as if they are telling the story of something they just did in reality. In the end, what you're responsible for as a game designer is whether a game is fun or not. Getting an organization of that size all heading in the same direction presents a lot of challenges. But in a large organization where you're building a platform and building a system, there are dozens-if not hundreds-of people involved. Sitting down in your office alone, creating something, is one way to get things done. There are a lot of social and managerial dimensions to the job. What is most challenging about a game designer job? You don't hear that when people talk about productivity software. People get excited when they talk about games. The people I work with all love to do what they're doing, and when I go out, I see people enjoying the things I work on. I love being able to create stuff-to come up with a cool idea and actually see it happen. Now, I'm responsible for a lot of the UI design for the next generation Xbox.

I had some great mentorship from the head of my group and really developed a passion for interface design. It was interesting to put together visual design, ergonomics, psychology and technology. Later, I went to Oracle to pursue UI design further. This was where I got interested in UI design. It seemed like a good medium for the creatives in the company. It was also the beginning of web design, which I got excited about and became involved in. I was a graphic designer for IBM, doing box designs, book illustrations and technical illustration.

Video game designer