About/Me

Very important: The material on this website represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, my family, my friends, my coworkers, or anybody else. Please do not represent me as anybody but "Chris Hecker" if you're going to quote from these pages. Thank you.

Contact Info

Chris Hecker
http://chrishecker.com
checker 'at' d6.com

I get a lot of email. I try to read it all and respond, but it takes time, and it seems I'm increasingly short of time. Sorry about that.

Professional Bio

Here's the bio I use for lectures, articles, conferences, and whatnot:

Chris Hecker
Technology Fellow, Maxis/Electronic Arts

Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and engineering. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually achieve their full potential as a medium. To this end he helps organize the Indie Game Jam and the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and his recent work at Maxis is centered on using proceduralism to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three. Before joining Maxis he was an indie game developer for 8 years with his company definition six, inc. He is also on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, The Journal of Graphics Tools. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century.

Headshots

Here's the usual boring and goofy headshot I use.

Here's an action shot of me lecturing in Montreal in 2007.

I kinda like this really old one. It's less boring than the first headshot, but perhaps even more goofy, since I was hiking near Crested Butte, CO.

Personal

I'll write some more general stuff about me here at some point. For now, you get my bio and headshot.

Here's my old "About Me" blurb from my original webpage, which is out of date (i.e. do not use it as my bio, see above), but has the rough outline of my life in it (Parsons -> Microsoft -> d6 -> Maxis):

I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.