I’m Eric! I attempt to make games and am currently working toward a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Washington. My primary research interests are using science to aid games and using games to aid science. It’s only my first year, so we’ll see how well that goes. Check out my games!

Long-winded Version:

I grew up in love with playing games, pretending to explore places in the backyard, and building crazy worlds in the basement with all my toys. Then I discovered programming my senior year of highschool, and realized I could make actual computer games and therefore be able to inflict my ideas on others. I have been working towards living out this dream ever since.

I went to undergrad at Carnegie Mellon for Mathematics, where I promptly weaseled my way into the Computer Science program instead. There, I took awesome classes and met a lot of awesome people, and in my spare time made games in the Game Creation Society. I ended up being the club’s “Director of Development” for 2 years, which means I tried to help students make games that were better than the crap I did, while convincing them that making “Halo as an MMO” is not a wise choice for their first game. It was awesome.

I worked at Mozilla for a summer in 2008 hacking on graphics code, which was amazing. Being able to be open and vocal about what you work on makes a job very satisfying.

I was somehow convinced that going to grad school was a good idea, so I started doing research projects for Adrien Treuille in the Computer Graphics department, which somehow resulted in me working on games. I stuck around for a year after undergrad to try some crazy stuff with streaming real-time graphics, which was really fun.

Then I found out you could cut out the middleman and work on games research directly, so I ended up at the University of Washington studying with Zoran Popović. I’ve only just started, but so far it’s been a fantastic experience. I’m really excited about what I’m doing and the people I get to work with. My current plan is to help make the game creation process easier by automating the straight-forward tasks and enabling the designer to have more power to express themselves. To that end, I’m working on methods for procedural content generation and tools for analyzing play data, and implementing these ideas in actual games.