Major(s): Classics
What is your current role? What was your journey in arriving there?
I am a video game designer and programmer, working at an independent game studio on a game called “Fields of Mistria”. After graduating from Wesleyan University, majoring in Classics, I intended to go to law school. To that end, I applied to various law schools, took the LSAT, and worked at the New York District Attorney’s office. I ended up admitted to Stanford Law School, but ultimately deferred my admission for two years before declining to enroll. I missed doing creative work, which I had done at Wes during my degree, and I grew to feel that a law career wasn’t the right path to go down. In my spare time, I had started to learn to program small games which I sent to friends, mostly to make them laugh. My fellow student, Edward Archibald, who also got a degree in Classics, helped me on several projects. “The Odyssey, as a very complicated Web Page” probably got the most laughs of these early projects. Eventually, I decided to try to pursue games fully. It took a few years to find my footing, but now I lead a team of four programmers and work on the design time at my studio as well.
What do you enjoy about your work? What challenges does your industry currently face?
I love the work. As a friend of a friend in Mexico City once said to me when I told him that I made video games: “You must have a very happy life.” The difficult is everything around the work — currently, games are undergoing a contraction from their pandemic high. However, we’re still a massive industry, so I hope this slows down. For now, my current game has been extremely successful and I hope to continue designing and creating games!
How did your time at Wesleyan influence your career choice/journey?
It’s hard to overstate how important Wesleyan, particularly my Classics degree was. Of course, programming languages are languages, and learning Greek and Latin helped me learn those more quickly and more accurately than I ever could have otherwise. However, that isn’t really the point — Classics taught me how to analyze problems systematically, approaching them with a rigor and a precision that I lacked beforehand. When I encounter some programming error, I analyze what I’ve written and compare it to what I expected to write; when I wrote Greek, I’d analyze my syntax errors and erroneous verb endings, and see what I ought to have written. Professor Andy, during Greek History, which I took with all my best friends sophomore year, told us that Classics was a mix of the “foreign and the familiar”. This turbulent mixture requires careful examination, because it can be used for misrepresentation just as much as it can be for re-representation. Last week, two of those best friends, who live across the street from me, and I were talking about making a game about Ancient Greece. We agreed that we weren’t sure if we could do it justice – Wesleyan, above all, taught us to be careful of how much of the ancient world we understood, how definitive to be about its working and beliefs. Today, I feel the same way about much of America – a mix of the foreign and the familiar. Much of my artistic work is about recreating the feeling that Wesleyan imparted on me: the world is complicated, it is impossible to fully understand, but you can start. It also taught me that 20th century French philosophy is actually quite fun to read. Without those skills, I wouldn’t have the job I have today – I probably would be working some desk job, counting away the hours, instead of spending them creating things.
Do you have any advice for students thinking about entering your industry?
Video games form a specialized industry. Unlike any other industry, output, not degree, matters. I would advise any student to simply start making games. It doesn’t matter if they’re good or bad, just make things. The creativity, and the flow you gain from it, is all that matters. Read, play, and watch everything. The more you take in, the more you can put out. If you want to be a great video game designer, you also need to be a great video game player. Exercise the critical skills you’ll develop at Wesleyan on every game you play — “Why does this work? Why doesn’t this work? Who chose this font? Why is the User Interface like this?” Try to answer every question you have, and then try to make something in response to whatever you’re experiencing.
Updated March 21, 2025
