Ben Seck—Treating Your Career Like a Game, Shifting from Cards to Mobile, and Being a Boss Who Actually Backs Their Team (#107)
About this episode
Ben Seck discusses treating your career like a game, the transition from card games to mobile, and effective leadership in game development.
About Ben Seck Ben Seck is an absolute titan of global game development and competitive play whose career path is an masterclass in strategic execution. Ben and I go back nearly 30 years to our early days on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour circuit, where he won a Grand Prix in Cape Town and scored a legendary Pro Tour top eight. Unlike most of our old-school peers, Ben is still actively crushing tournaments competitively today. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the R&D trenches at Upper Deck Entertainment during the wild-west era of the Versus System card game, both eventually shifting from pure game design into brand and product management . While I left to bootstrap Stone Blade, Ben strategically expanded his toolkit by jumping into the digital free-to-play explosion at Zynga. Since then, he has served as a senior leader and executive at some of the biggest entertainment powerhouses on earth (including Walt Disney, King, and Scopely) and is currently the Head of New Games at Gram Games in London. He has managed teams of hundreds and launched massive digital projects played by tens of millions of users globally. In this episode, we break down how to treat your creative…
More episodes of Think Like A Game Designer
- Luke Peterschmidt — Designing for Massive Fandoms, Eliminating Obstacles, and Exploiting Your Superpowers (#107)
- Ivan Van Norman — From Broke Graduate to Geek & Sundry, the Reality of Scaling an Indie Studio, and Embracing Content Innovation (#106)
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