Mini Trip to Helsinki

Yesterday after work I jumped on a train and headed to Helsinki. The main reason for the trip was that Bassoradio had invited me to do an interview on my job. I work as a game designer, and games industry is very hot right now. They are doing a series to help young people get to know what working actually is an presenting them different occupations.

To avoid waking up super early, I travelled the 200 or so kilometres on the previous day and stayed at my parents' place for the night. Once in Helsinki I absolutely had to visit some shops that my home city does not have. I stopped by an Inglot store to buy a few of their brightly coloured gel liners and went to check out the MAC counter. I ended up not buying anything from MAC, but everything looked so pretty and the newest collection had cute plastic packaging imitating drops of water on the surface.

In the morning I noticed I'm in luck since the tramline that goes past my parents' place went straight to the Bassoradio office, so it was very easy to find my way there. They had an awesome office in an old building with mismatched lamps on the ceiling.

Lamps in all shapes and sizes.

 Ina, who did the interview was such a nice person, we hit off immediately! We liked the same kind of shoes and that's a sure thing to help ladies bond ;D The interview went out live, but you can listen to it on Bassoradio's Souncloud. It's in Finnish only, sorry! I hope some youngsters might have now gotten a tiny bit better picture of what working in the game industry is :) Here's also their news article on the interview. They chose an excellent sentence for the headline, the fact that I'm actually not a very good player! It's true ;D My reflexes are not very quick, I'm not very motivated to win and get frustrated quickly. People often think that people who are good at playing games are also good at designing games. I personally think these things are not connected. Since I fail often, I am very well aware of how important it is for games to also take into account players who don't instantly master the game, and how they can be gently ushered into making better choices and gradually learning the game. It's actually a very rewarding experience to first suck at a game and slowly learn to master it.

I play many types of games, many slow paced variants like puzzles, adventure games, city builders, god games and casual games, and then sometimes fast paced games like the new Diablo or World of Warcraft. Naturally when it is my job I need to look at many different genres and play different games, but I still love playing. When I finish this text I'll be off to kill demons in Diablo 3 ;P

Me and Ina.

After the interview I hopped on a train and diligently went straight to work, because the game we are working on won't finish itself!