About Me
The Basics
Coffee or Tea? Coffee
Cats or Dogs? Dogs
Apple or PC? PC
Hi! I’m Jackson (he/him). I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Interactive Design at William Peace University, where I create and teach courses on UX design, game design and development, and web development.
In whatever work I do, I feel the most fulfilled when I’m able to center my focus on enabling and empowering people. Who I’m empowering and what I’m enabling them to do naturally changes from role to role and project to project, but the core of what motivates me in my work remains the same.
I especially feel that gamification is a massively powerful tool capable of affording designers a means of offering people experiences, understandings, and perspectives to which they may have otherwise been permanently and unknowingly blind. In my eyes, there is no reason that expressive and educational games shouldn't be engaging in their own rights, or that accessibility should be an afterthought.
Inspirations
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Whether by inspiring the artistic direction of my work, by offering valuable perspectives, or just because of their sense of humor, these authors and philosophers have had profound impacts on me:
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Don Norman
- James Joyce
- Douglass Adams
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We can create games with powerful themes right now. But why? Why do this? Out of a selfish need for artistic expression? No. Because we are designers.
These game designers have changed how I look at games, how I think about design as a process and craft, and how I think about the way players experience games:
- Jesse Schell
- Lucas Pope
- Hidetaka Miyazaki
- Fumito Ueda
- James Portnow
If I started spending money on Old Branches and Used Bandages, I'd be out of business in a jiffy!
While not necessarily my favorite games (though many of them are on that list as well), these games have taught me the most and done the most to shake and reshape my ideas of how games can reach their players:
- Bloodborne
- Hollow Knight
- INSIDE
- Shadow of the Colossus
- Undertale