Bernie Yee Brings Industry Lessons to the ETC

From massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like EverQuest to popular mobile games like Plants vs. Zombies 2 to Meta Quest’s earliest virtual reality (VR) experiences, Bernie Yee has spent his career developing games at the cutting edge of the industry.

Today, he’s the newest faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). We asked him about his career, his perspective on the industry, his approach to game design and what led him to the ETC.

Your career has spanned three platform shifts: MMORPGs, mobile games and VR. What patterns have you noticed in how the industry responds to a new platform, and how does that impact your approach today?

The challenge with shifts like these is learning from prior design models’ approaches to answering “player value” questions without applying those lessons rigidly. When exploring a new area, first principles are the best place to start. But even that can be its own trap. Frank Lantz wrote a great piece reminding us that despite elegant game design taxonomies, many great games have a very inelegant design architecture.

In your work at Oculus, you produced some of the first VR experiences for Meta Quest. What did making those experiences teach you about designing for new technology and new users?

We really tried to appeal to as many people as possible. That meant staying away from “core gamer” tropes that you might see in AAA games like Destiny or Grand Theft Auto. We wanted the experiences to be welcoming, like Nintendo games. We wanted to eliminate motion sickness, which really pushed us to develop near-field interactions. VR is particularly good at that, and console games rarely explore it.

You’ve worked in many different roles in the industry, including design, production and business development. How has that perspective changed the way you approach making games now? Making a game and marketing a game used to be two different things; that is probably still true at the AAA level to some degree. But one of the biggest shifts is the rise of development in the open: Community, marketing and development have all blended together. It may be the only way an indie game can find an audience, but even huge games like Baldur’s Gate 3 spent years in early access. That didn’t hinder sales, it seems. You can contrast that with secretive games like Grand Theft Auto. I think fewer games can succeed with a “build in secret for a huge reveal” approach. I’m concerned that the “memeability” of a game might artificially influence the kinds of games that are made. If that’s true, that’s a loss for the medium.

After years at established studios, you co-founded Windup Minds, a VR and mixed reality (MR) games startup. What was that experience like, and what are you working on there now?

A games startup of our size is incredibly hard to maintain in this climate. We raised capital through venture funding, but I think it’s clear that games can’t be a sustainable venture-scale sector today. Where we go is still an open question, but we shipped three products that are loved by a small community. Shipping anything that brings enjoyment to people is a privilege.

What led you to join the ETC, and what are you most excited about in your new role?

I met ETC Director Derek Ham at SIGGRAPH, where we served on the same jury for several days. He invited me to attend two final project review sessions at the ETC, and I found the teams to be exceptionally driven and ambitious. It’s easy to teach and advise students like that, and frankly, it’s a welcome change of perspective compared to running a startup for more than three years! It brings me back to my teaching roots at Columbia, which I gave up after I moved to Seattle.

My feedback is really informed by the grueling process of making a commercial game. There are hard questions to answer, and if I can bring some of that rigor to student projects, I’ll be happy to help prepare them for whatever work they pursue after graduation, in games or elsewhere.