Gaming the humanities: how literature enriches the gaming world. From the article:

After four years, [Connie Wang] Griffith transplanted herself to the Seattle tech scene and was snapped up by ArenaNet to work on the latest expansion of Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire, a popular MMORPG [massively multiplayer online role playing game]. There, she truly began to utilize her comparative literature background to design several of the main story missions of the game.

“The bread and butter of what I did as a comparative literature student was to take a text and analyze it. What’s being said here? How is it reflective of its history or time or the person who wrote it? We do the exact same thing in gaming. We take a game and ask what makes it work. We look at context, game mechanics and player experiences and applying that sort of analysis to games has made me a much better designer,” Griffith says. 

One of her design missions for Path of Fire was to uncover the mysteries of Tyria —the world of GW2—and have the player discover what happened to all the gods that had abandoned the planet 250 years prior.

“It was a very thoughtful process to explore the enigmas of this fantasy world. I started by asking ‘What do I want the player to be feeling when they’re playing my content?’ Then I sat down and actually wrote out the concrete mechanics that would reinforce that feeling,” she says….

While her past work is a hard act to follow, Griffith just recently landed her dream job at Sucker Punch Productions. She’s a senior game designer for the visually stunning game Ghost of Tsushima. Reminiscent of a Kurosawa film, the game is set on the small islands of Tsushima— part of the Japanese archipelago halfway between the Japanese mainland and the Korean peninsula—during feudal times.

“[This game] is probably the one that I’m most excited about in my 16-year career. You play as one of the last surviving samurai—this character named Jin Sakai. The Mongols have invaded the islands. Jin has to learn to compromise some of his samurai ideals about honor and become more of a ninja stealth assassin character because that’s the only way that he’s going to save his people,” Griffith says.

Once again, she’s employing the critical thinking and comparative analysis of history and linguistics that she learned at UCI. Griffith says there’s been some backlash against games and the way they’ve reinforced notions of imperialism—something she’s now more conscious of and aiming to rectify.