Nina Freeman is a video game designer known for games with themes of sexuality and self-reflection. She is currently a game designer at Fulbright and was in Forbes 2015 list of influential video game industry figures. In this episode, we talk about ways to self-promote and stay relevant. How streaming narrative-driven games is more helpful than harmful.

Nina Freeman is designer that currently works at Fullbright, for Tacoma , a futuristic murder mystery set in space. She is notably known for her indie game Cibele, which intersperses live footage of Freeman with gameplay, to capture when the first wave of young people began flirting and connecting in online chatrooms. Most recently, she released Kimmy, a five-act, interactive novel about her mother’s childhood babysitting job in the 60s, and Lost Memories Dot Net, a game based on her experiences making websites in the early 2000s.

How I Started Making Games

Nina originally was living in New York and “had just finished my Undergrad degree in English literature fairly recently. I was working a job in the department of education as a data analyst and I was kind of all over the place. And I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do. And then I fell in with a group of game developers. They were kind of like, my friends, and I was hanging out with them and a bunch of them were starting school at the NYU Game Center so we were attending a bunch of game jams and stuff.”

“I was at a weird place in my life, so I was kind of figuring out what I wanted to do.

She recalls how she “was at a weird place in my life, so I was kind of figuring out what I wanted to do.” Thankfully, her decision to continue to hang out with a bunch of friends push her “to teach myself how to code at those game jams.” This was happening around a time where she was “trying to figure out what I wanted to do next in life. Trying to find something I was passionate about outside of my day job.”

Unexpectedly, the early flash games she worked on in those game jams “kind of took off on the internet and gained some traction.” In which she thought “Wow, people are actually playing this! Oh my god. This is so cool!” That boost was enough to inspire her “to keep up with it and [she] haven’t looked back since.”

She mentions how this was “the time when Gone Home came out, Kentucky Route Zero, and Cart Life and alot of these, like, pretty now well-known narrative games within the indie space.” All of which had a strong influence on her work and really fueled her desire to really get into games.

Learning by Doing