Google hypes mobile game creators in new behind-the-scenes series

By Christian de Looper May 23, 2018

Google wants to take you behind the scenes of some of your favorite video games. Google Play is launching a new video series called First Person: The personal stories of the creative people behind mobile gaming, and it’s aimed at highlighting some of the creative minds behind the games you might play on your phone.

To start with, the company is releasing three videos on three different individuals in the gaming industry. These individuals have worked not just on great mobile games, but also other games that have made waves in the gaming industry as a whole.

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For starters, there’s Ashly Burch, a voice-actor known for voicing characters like Aloy in Horizon: Zero Dawn and Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series. In this episode, Burch goes over things like where she draws inspiration for a voice-acting role and how that translates into her voice.

Next up is Bennett Foddy, a game designer and instructor at New York University’s Game Center. Foddy has been involved with games like QWOP and Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy, which have become pretty successful online. In this episode, Foddy goes over what makes creating challenging games so exciting.

The third and final episode to be released for now follows Vassiliki Khonsari, who co-founded Ink Stories and co-created 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, a popular mobile game. Khonsari specifically aims to use games to educate people, and in this video, she discusses Fire Escape, a virtual reality experience that goes over gentrification in Brooklyn.

The videos are each only a few minutes long, but they are an interesting look at the creators and developers behind the scenes of some of the best games out there.

Of course, it’s possible that Google is hoping to create more hype about some of the games on the Google Play Store through series like this. After Apple redesigned the App Store in 2017, it was found that users were downloading more apps from the service. While we don’t expect a major redesign of the Google Play Store anytime soon, Google could still be trying to encourage users to download more apps through other means.

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