Welcome to the personal website for game designer Ben Miller.
This website is a couple years out-of-date and in major need of redevelopment. Since I want to rebuild my website from the ground up in glorious html5 and jquery goodness I will need a fair amount of additional free time that I cannot spare due to the major projects in my life. So, dear visitor, while I apologize for the oldness and the mess, I hope you are able to find something fun!
My current projects include the following:
Wemo Media [Lead Designer]: My primary job is lead designer for Wemo Media, a startup focused on creating interactive entertainment experiences that unite the world through shared storytelling and the creation of digital art. Our first project is a social/casual, free-to-play, browser game about the ocean. The game is scheduled for release in the summer of 2011. Visit The Blu for more information.
Insomniac Games [Contract Lead Designer]: I am continuing some of the work I started at Insomniac while I worked there full time during most of 2010. I am working on a super-awesome secret game I will hopefully be able to talk about soon!
iiii Design [Co-owner/Co-Founder]: Aaron and I are continuing our the iPhone development work on Move It!, a game we started while still in graduate school. We have recently partnered with Katherine Isbister and some of her awesome graduate students at New York University Polytechnic Institute to help us finish the game an make it even more awesome. We hope to release Move It! in Fall 2011!
Friends on Play [Contributor]: I speak on a weekly podcast with a bunch of awesome game designers that are currently working in the industry. The podcast is simply a recording of a couple friends getting together to chat about game design. We would hold these game design discussions in a coffee shop each week if we lived in the same location. Fortunately for you, we are spread across the US and are forced to chat over skype! :)
Armory Center for the Arts [Teacher]: I spent some time last summer (2010) working with Richard Lemarchand and Michael John to to develop a short teaching program aimed at educating high school students and teachers about game design and creating projects for the Interactive category in the prestigious Scholastic Art & Writing Award competition. I led the presentation for the students and loved the entire experience. I hope to continue this work in 2011.
Holla at me any questions, criticisms, or compliments via email: noursemiller at gmail.com.
Short Bio
Ben has been working towards meaningfully impacting the world for over five years. He is currently Lead Designer at Wemo Media, a next-generation studio focused on globally shared media. After graduating from the University of Virginia where he studied English and Computer Science he worked as an Educational Project Manager for a small software company that developed and published educational software to help treat congenital heart disease.
Eventually, he followed his life-long desire to create interactive digital experiences and started studying at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. At CMU he helped develop an interactive theatrical performance of Rashomon and create a motion-based iPhone game, Move It!, designed to meaningfully support real-world interactions through a digital device, among other projects. After graduating he started working as a game designer at Insomniac Games, one of the game industry’s most respected independent developers. He left Insomniac for Wemo Media to focus more on creating strongly-meaningful play experiences that help improve the lives of the players and the world after they have left the gameplay experience.
He has spoken at the Meaningful Play conference in Michigan about the development of Move It! which he works on in his spare time with designer Aaron Vanderbeek, Katherine Isbister, and a team of graduate students at New York University Polytechnic Institute. His work has been recently published in Drew Davidson’s Well Played 2.0 and shown at the GDC Online conference in 2010. He continues to work with Insomniac as a contract Lead Designer on a currently unannounced project and teaches game design to high school students from time-to-time at the Armory Center for Arts in Pasadena.
Whatnots
