Meet Nicky: Head of Game Production Behind Our Games
How my passion for serious games brought me to Nordaurai
When did you start producing games, and what drew you to it?
I ended up creating games after Covid. Many people changed during that time, for me it was partially my profession. It quite quickly felt right. It brought me back to my childhood and the start of my passion to help people. Games might be considered an interesting path when one talks about helping others, but this area of entertainment has helped so many people globally. Whether it is by helping you connect to others, learning a new skill, or perhaps processing traumatic experiences, games help us learn and grow as individuals.
I had a bunch of educational games when I was young, I found them really fun. It never occurred to me that I was learning until I realised I could speak English like it was my mother tongue and I knew basic chemistry in class without reading about it. Eventually there were not enough educational games to teach me what I needed to know and I turned to books. Books are amazing too, and they showed me that I had little focus despite the contents of the book. Long lines of text that could hold the answers to the universe, or be made into fantastic stories and wonderful worlds – by someone less distracted than me. I wanted to read, but the books always ended up unread next to my bed while I was out socialising or on the sofa watching movies. I later on found out that I had strong ADHD, and would need a little more than an interesting story to keep my focus.
Where did you and Angela first cross paths?
If there is a book that keeps my focus, however, it is a book that tells about a part of someone's life. An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan comes to mind (I would like to thank my English teacher for introducing that book to me). My interest in these kinds of books might be explained by my eagerness for socialisation. People are interesting, all individuals have a story and a lifetime of knowledge that they might share if you ask them. Being curious and social is how I ended up at an event I didn’t think I would go to, but I was curious and it promised a lot of people. True enough, thousands of people were there, among them: Angela. She was one of few who told me an interesting story with an interesting perspective.
When Angela told me about Nordaurai I was aiming to create educational games, just like the ones in my childhood, but for teenagers and up. However, as a person who has gone through my own mental turmoil, creating games through positive psychology to help people learn how to conquer their mind didn’t sound like a bad idea. I was working on an advertising game at the time, which was fun, but not what I imagined myself doing full-time. Angela’s story got me curious about creating well-being games and how to make them have the impact necessary to create change.
Why did you choose wellbeing games over entertainment games?
Work-life balance is difficult, and while we would like to say that things are getting easier every year, there are more and more things creating imbalance for us. I am not saying that positive psychology is the way to fix your life, but it is a start. Understanding yourself and others from a different perspective might give you some headspace to deal with other pressing issues. It’s like reading a manual and cleaning the dust away from the machine that is your brain, so that you can use it better and not have sudden explosions from a gear flying off. There have been so many times in my life where I wanted to shut that machine off just to get some peace and quiet, but eventually it needs to be turned back on again. It is much nicer when it is not covered in dust and everything is working as it should. That’s what I want to do through our games. I want to give people manuals and cleaners so that they can clear their machines up and start living a more positive life.
Would you like to see what kind of wellbeing games we are producing for you and for your organization, to make wellbeing engaging and drive effective, positive behavior change?
