Very important: The material on this website represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, my family, my friends, my coworkers, or anybody else. Please do not represent me as anybody but "Chris Hecker" if you're going to quote from these pages. Thank you.

Contact Info

Chris Hecker
http://chrishecker.com
checker 'at' d6.com

I get a lot of email. I try to read it all and respond, but it takes time, and it seems I'm increasingly short of time. Sorry about that.

Professional Bio

Here's the bio I use for lectures, articles, conferences, and whatnot:

Chris Hecker
definition six, inc.

Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually reach their full potential as a medium. To this end he helped organize the Indie Game Jam, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and the Depth Jam, and his recent work on Spore centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and was on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, The Journal of Graphics Tools. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company definition six, inc. and on a hundred-person team at Maxis/Electronic Arts. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is SpyParty, an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.

Headshots

Here's one from the Official GDC 2010 Flickr set. I like this one, please use it.

Here's the boring and goofy headshot I used to use.

Here's an action shot of me lecturing in Montreal in 2007.

I kinda like this really old one. It's less boring than the first headshot, but perhaps even more goofy, since I was hiking near Crested Butte, CO.

Personal

I'll write some more general stuff about me here at some point. For now, you get my bio and headshot.

Until recently, I was a Technology Fellow at Maxis/Electronic Arts. I'm not sure what the title meant either. A friend once quipped I was higher ranked than a Technology Chap, but lower ranked than a Technology Gentleman.

Here's my old "About Me" blurb from my original webpage, which is out of date (i.e. do not use it as my bio, see above), but has the rough outline of my life in it (Parsons -> Microsoft -> d6 -> Maxis):

I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.

PGP Public Key

Also available at MIT's PGP keyserver and it's Key ID 0xD8DE7218.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin)
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=mk6n
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----