Better, Stronger, Faster Through Games

After years of teaching within the Chicago Public Schools system, Alex Damarijan (Ph.D. THUM ’22) had all but abandoned his dream of becoming a game designer.

“I gave up on getting a job at a game studio. I didn’t think I was good enough,” Damarijan says.

He went to school to study art, but after mass layoffs in the gaming industry around the turn of the millennium, Damarijan had earned a teaching degree as a fallback. He taught for CPS for seven years, eventually ending up at the Tarkington School of Excellence on Chicago’s South Side.

In the evenings, as a stress reliever, he digitally created fantastical art and 3D modeling, including an animated short film.

“It was all over the place. I had characters, objects, a waterfall scene with a head coming through the waterfall. I always loved children’s stories because I was teaching kids, too,” Damarijan says.

Then, while searching for a summer job, he attended an International Game Developers Association Chicago meetup and bumped into the art director at High Voltage Software, a Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based gaming company.

He asked to be considered as a temporary summer game tester.

“I thought I could tell the kids when I got back that I did something in the industry,” Damarijan says.

After a long conversation, the director told Damarijan to apply for an artist job instead.

“Because they did games for different companies, they liked my art because it was all over the place,” Damarijan laughs. “My ‘B.S. art degree’ ended up not being ‘B.S.’ when I was hired.”

In 2007, he was brought on as a contracted 3D artist at High Voltage, with the art director telling him, “I’m going to give you a chance, because I don’t know if you’re slow.”

He wasn’t slow.

“My first day I came in and there was free food: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and coffee. I was sitting at a computer, it was quiet, and I thought, ‘This is the dream.’ No screaming parents,” Damarijan says.

He put his head down and produced, grinding all summer. After that, “They told me they had one other guy that worked that hard, who came from jail,” he says.

After three months, Damarijan was hired full-time as a character designer, while also teaching part-time at the Illinois Institute of Art’s former Schaumburg, Illinois, campus. He also returned to art school with a passion, earning a master’s degree in animation from DePaul University, a Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and finally his doctorate from Illinois Tech.

During his studies, he worked in game design, and eventually picked up a specialty after having dinner with a colleague of his sister, who was—like her—a pediatric ophthalmologist. The colleague was also a missionary who conducted free eye surgeries for children in Myanmar (formerly Burma).

The man told him about an idea for a Nintendo game that did vision screenings: kids would play the game and the computer would garner enough information to develop a prescription, in addition to serving as a test for color blindness.

Damarijan told him it was something he could work on, and—as part his Illinois Tech dissertation—of he created PDI Check, a tool now used in multiple countries.

“A lot of these things you need kids to pay attention to for a long time, and if it’s boring, they’re not going to do it. They have to play these games for 30 minutes, and they have to be fun enough to hold [their attention],” Damarijan says.

He found that he liked developing games that focus on physical therapy, education, or addressing disabilities. And he discovered that many companies shared that interest.

After PDI Check was produced and Damarijan spoke at a gaming conference about how games could help patients adhere to medical protocols, Vivid Vision offered him a job as a technical artist to help develop an educational memory game called Barnyard Bounce.

“I think he likes the idea of helping people and doing something with technology that goes beyond gaming, that has a positive impact on someone’s life,” says Aaron Molina, a senior developer who worked at High Voltage with Damarijan. “He’s very family oriented and has strong relationships with his friends and co-workers. It’s something you don’t necessarily see all the time. Some people just want to go in and do their job.”

Damarijan has since gone on to help in the development of many of these types of games, including a physical therapy game called Dog Fetch for Kruma Labs. Players in the virtual reality game would repetitively throw a ball to a digital dog, who would return it.

“If somebody dislocates their shoulder, they have to do range-of-motion exercises, so you put those exercises into the game. Usually [without the game] they shrug it off, but the thing about anything good for us, you have to do it with repetition and time. Some of these older people get bored or lonely, [but] they really did like the dog,” Damarijan says. “I really do think it helps them adhere to what they’re supposed to do.”

Recently, Damarijan worked for Netflix for three years before the company closed its game studio and is now pitching a new game to Netflix. Throughout his industry career, he has taught game development courses at multiple universities and currently runs the master’s program in game development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

While the United States gaming industry is currently going through a bit of a down cycle, Damarijan sees opportunities in independent and small developer titles. If given the chance again, “I probably would’ve still [chosen to pursue] educational games. That one-chance thing with my sister’s doctor is what set me down that path, but it’s incredibly important and rewarding.” —Tad Vezner