Fawzi Mesmar

When I was in middle school, the first Resident Evil game came out on the first PlayStation, and it blew my mind. In 1996, in the Middle East, we didn’t have widespread internet just yet, and during those years I used to finish a game, then replay it while writing by hand what I was doing in a school notebook: a walkthrough that ended up helping other kids finish whatever game I made a walkthrough for themselves. I was doing a similar walkthrough for Resident Evil, tracing the map of the Spencer Mansion and highlighting which key opened which door.

That was when it hit me: I was tracing what I was seeing directly and drawing it in my notebook. The moment of insight was that somewhere in Japan, someone imagined all of this and made it a reality for me to trace. They came up with this out of nowhere. That insight made me realise what being a game designer meant for the first time, and how it was the job I must have. This was also my first true encounter with how a creative process comes to be, and my endless fascination with creativity in game development began.

We can’t create what we don’t know. Everything we make will, without a doubt, come from somewhere in our life experience. Cultural backgrounds and ideologies are the most instinctive to us, which is why they are so evident in our creations, gaming or otherwise, and it’s a notion I focus on in this book quite significantly.

Since my early days in Jordan, my career has taken me around the world: from working as a designer for Atlus on Persona, to principal designer on IP tie-in games at Gameloft in New Zealand, to creative director on local-market-only games in Japan, to leading design and production for Candy Crush in Germany, to heading up design for Battlefield at EA DICE in Sweden, to overseeing creative on several projects in different European studios at Ubisoft.

Regardless of where I was in the world, I was always teaching game design, from Auckland University of Science and Technology, Berlin Games Academy, Cologne Design University, London University of Arts, and NYU, to Futuregames in Stockholm, where I held a position on the board of education for the school.

I have worked with hundreds of designers, students, and indie developers throughout my journey, and dozens of creative directors and leaders. I had many observations about how those people came up with ideas, their understanding of their creative voice, and how they spoke about it. I often mused that I was in the idea business, due to the nature of my day job and my passion for education. I was in a situation where lots of different people were pitching and discussing their ideas with me. I started to see patterns: how people come up with ideas, how they react when their ideas are discussed, how others struggle to articulate their ideas and to get others behind them.

Those observations ended up in my book, Demystifying Creativity: On Originality in Game Development. The topic of creativity and innovation is something that comes up in my line of work on a daily basis. It is critical to my industry and to the success of the games we make. It is also a heavily debated topic, with many different and conflicting opinions on the matter.