WRITER, GAME DESIGNER & TEACHER

Paul is an experienced Melbourne based writer, game developer, and teacher with over 10 years of experience working in the games industry.

Paul knew he wanted to make video games when he first saw the chunky pixels of an Atari 2600 when he was 8 years old. Two years later, he got his first computer and taught himself how to program on it, and then 10 years after that, he finally got his first job as a programmer in the games industry.

Since then he’s worked in the UK and Australia as a programmer, a designer, a teacher, and a writer. He’s surprised, sometimes, that people pay him to do the sorts of things that he does – sit around and make games for a living.

He’s presented on games development, writing for games, at Game Connect Asia Pacific, the National Screenwriters’ Conference, the Victorian IT Teachers Association conference, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and appeared on the ABC2’s Good Game show. He is also the co-director of the Freeplay independent games festival – an event designed to showcase independent games and give audiences the chance to interact with game creators.

His interests are varied, and he’s happy to talk about any topic related to games design and development, including:

A job playing games
Where should I start? What subjects should I study at school? What jobs are there? Can I make a living out of it? Should I play lots of games?

Game Design
How do video games work? What does it mean when something is ‘fun’? What does a game designer actually do?
Writing for games

Why do some games have a story? How are video game stories different from other books or comics or films? What are the challenges of writing for games?

Games as tools for learning, literacy and numeracy

What do games have to do with learning? With literacy skills? With numeracy? How can we use video games to develop those skills?

Also an award winning short story writer, Paul has written, directed and script-edited short films, collaborated on comics, and is currently finishing his second novel.

Paul enjoys sharing his experiences writing and creating games, encouraging students and teachers to critically engage with the possibilities of the medium and develop a newfound appreciation of the games that they play and their place in the wider world.