How did a neuroscientist end up at Riot Games?

It's been over 3 years since I joined Riot Games as a Game Designer, and I've been documenting the entire adventure. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the player behavior journey at Riot Games, starting from the very beginning. Looking back, little did I know where this journey would take me, and how far it would go beyond games.

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Ever since I could first hold a controller, I have loved video games. I spent endless hours with my younger brother trying to beat Contra with only 3 lives (and we eventually did it!). I stayed up all night to unwrap Super Bomberman and its 4-player adapter on Christmas morning and beat games like Super Mario Brothers 3 and Legend of the Mystical Ninjas 2 a hundred times. My path towards the gaming industry started in 2010. I was a cognitive neuroscience PhD student funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to study human cognition and how our attention can be grabbed and manipulated by subconscious events. In May, Mike Ambinder from Valve Software visited the University of Washington and gave a talk to the Psychology Department about how psychology can be applied to game design. I was hooked. Everything I was studying, everything I was working on could be applied to video game design. Three months after that talk, I had secured a rolling desk at Valve Software while I continued working towards my PhD.

Two years later, I graduated with my PhD and received offers to do science but my taste of the games business had permanently reoriented me towards a career in gaming. While exploring my options, I attended PAX Prime and met Kevin “Geeves” O’ Brien for the first time. We had been playing video games together for a decade beginning with Everquest (Hi Ruined and Legacy of Steel!). Geeves and I were sitting on the steps outside PAX when he mentioned in passing that I should check out this start-up company called Riot Games. He also noted that a guildmate of ours — Christina Norman, former lead designer of the Mass Effect series — was also at Riot Games.

When I first entered Riot HQ, something was different compared to traditional academia. There were no offices — just open spaces. There was a PC Café inside headquarters. It was silly, crazy and ingenious all at the same time. First, I met Tom “Zileas” Cadwell, VP of Game Design. Tom took exactly 3.14 seconds before he jumped into absurd brain teasers and unsolvable psychological riddles. We still joke today that Tom’s a human IQ test. But, I challenged him back — and was impressed. Tom understood a lot about neuroscience and psychology and our conversations wandered across diverse territory, from virtual economies and free to play models to online player behavior. I then met my guildmate Christina who opened with, “I am just going to call you Lyte, since I have known you as Lyte my entire life.” That’s fair, I thought; after all, I had only known her as “kitae” my entire life too. Every time I met someone new, I grew more excited. A common theme rang throughout the day: Most game developers treated player behavior as an unsolvable problem — can we affect how players play our game and how they treat other players online?

At the end of the day the co-founders of Riot Games, Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill asked me a simple question, “What do you want to do at Riot?” My answer was now clear: I wanted to build games with the psychology of players in mind; I wanted to shape player behaviors through the features of a game. I believed that game development was not just about creating great games — we could create great communities too.

- Jeff