I was a level designer at Electronic Arts and I consider myself to be, uh, a level designer at the company I work for now. It's Super Giant Games which I co-founded. And I really like the term level designer. Um, and I like it because I think level design is just, uh, it just feels like one of the most work intensive parts of design. Uh, 'cause, 'cause you're actually building a space -- you're basically -- it's like cooking or something. You're taking all the ingredients, um, that someone else has produced, right? Like, someone else has made the music. Someone else has made the art. Someone else has programmed the characters and programmed the enemy EI. And I have some small control over those things. I can choose when they play. I can say how loud they're going to be or how soft they're going to be. Um, I can, I can choose the pacing. I can change attributes about them. And basically, I take all these ingredients that someone, you know, in their head had that were going to be amazing when they're put together and I get to, I get to, I get to try and do surprising things with them. Um, that's one of my favorite things to do is level designer. It's to take something that someone has made and do something unexpected with it. And even though you were the person who wrote it or even though you were the person who, who programmed it, um, you were, you were kind of surprised. Maybe you were appalled at the way I decided to sort of pair it, um, in, in the actual game context. So, for me, level design is like a real thing. It's like a real skill. Um, it, it, it's a craft. It, uh, it can be taught. Um, and it can be, it can be improved through experience, through, you know -- You can go teach yourself level design now just by using editors. Um, you know, as to what is a level, certainly games like open world games have made it really hard to sort of define, you know, what is a single piece of content? What is a single slice of something? Um, but I think it has meaning to the people making the things. They know where content is siloed. And they know what that content has to do. Um, and, and they know what they want out of it and what they want, uh, to do to make it, to make it better.
