Confessions of a Serious Games Designer

Tom Fisher, President Imaginetic

I Started my Career when I was 10-years Old

I didn’t know it at the time, but I began my eventual career when I was 10 years old, and my best friend’s cousin brought these weird dice and painted minis to play.

I remember the smell of the rulebook and the tiny, delicately painted miniature of a desert fighter wielding a scimitar who would become Torpan the Half-Elf.

I had always been an avid reader, and loved games. I devoured the Hobbit, and looked forward to weekends at my grandmother’s where we played Chess, Risk, and all manner of board games. But this…this game was different. I lived the part of Torpan at the game table. I wasn’t constrained by anything but imagination. I was fully and completely engaged. At the table, I was Torpan, and my every die roll was Torpan’s fate revealing itself.

This engagement, and level of personal investment is what I carried with me into my career, and the founding of Imaginetic. I dare say, it’s what founded many of the things I am passionate about: whether my rugby days, sailing, or personal life. 

Great games are a conduit for creativity. They allow safe exploration, and experimentation. They permit the player to try their logic against a grand-master and learn from their choices, so the next play they can make a different choice, choose an optimal path, or surprise their opponent with a dazzling move. 

Serious games are, thus, the crucible in which players and facilitators can push ideas to their limits and develop the new pathways, the best practices, and explore the most serious what-ifs. As I teach to my students, serious games are revelatory experiences, revealing knowledge, and showing us our shortcomings, and strengths. Allowing us to balance risky and heavy decisions where we are genuinely invested but safe, and secure. In an environment of pure learning and exploration, these games make us push ourselves and test our wits before we take new found skills out into the real world.

I was just involved in a military simulation playtest, this very morning, with two young designers who were so very invested they commented “this is so stressful” with a laugh. I thought at that moment of the fantastic, joyful excitement and stress or pushing forward with Torpan, my Half-Elf into the unknown imaginary catacombs, seeking adventure and glory as a 10-year old.