Building with Sticky Tape and Hope: Tricks and Mistakes of a Game Designer
This talk from 2012 is broad in scope and partially autobiographical (I no longer have the brief but I believe that was requested). It covers expertise, the benefits of constraints (or the danger of their absence) and tricks for designers to get over the issue of trying to 'think their way past' a problem. It charts my circuitous route to becoming a designer and the mistakes I made, alongside key moments where established developers (Ion Storm, Bungie, Blizzard) were seemingly perfectly poised to do great work but circumstances got the better of them. The takeaways are: here are my mistakes so you can try to avoid them and even the best intentions of experienced developers can go awry.
What I Do Series - Liam Hill - 'The Problem with Expertise'
This 2015 talk focuses on just the topic of expertise and how it is gained and what that means for my work as a designer and therefore the work of the games designers learning at Brisbane's SAE Institute who were the audience. The takeaway is that students and aspiring designers should be aware of the gap between their 'taste' (their ability to discern games they enjoy) and their ability to make/design games. They will need to climb the ladder that is the 'Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition' which will allow them to eventually do good work more consistently.