As Director of Gaming and Associate Creative Director at Cartoon Network, I led creative for one of the internet's largest free online gaming destinations — a platform that grew past 2 billion gameplays a year, with a record 77 minutes average time spent per visitor in summer 2007.
From my very first week at Cartoon Network, when I built a spreadsheet of every existing game on the website and tracked it's analytics, I built a data-driven strategy for increasing engagement and retention on the site, while keeping focus on network promotional priorities.
By the late 2000s, a promotional web game wasn't enough — audiences wanted persistent worlds, personalization, and the ability to make their own content. That shift is what led to two of the projects I'm proudest of:
MINI MATCH
Cartoon Network's first virtual world was built around an original IP whose characters and storyline I conceived and helped develop. Rather than extending an existing television property, the project created a new universe designed specifically for online interaction and social play. MINI MATCH was an adventure world, and while the characters and places players could visit there were not from the shows they watched, we designed it all to feel like it belonged in the Cartoon Network universe.
Mini Match
Mini Match Game Screen
Mini Match concept illustration
Mini Match storyboard
GAME CREATOR
One of the projects I'm most proud of is the award-winning Game Creator series for Ben 10 Alien Force, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and Batman: Brave and the Bold. The franchise went on to include other brands, but those were the ones I directed.
Instead of simply asking players to consume content, we gave them the tools to become creators themselves.
Players designed, shared, and played one another's games, dramatically extending engagement while strengthening their connection to Cartoon Network's brands. We even designed player profiles in MINI MATCH to show off player's Game Creator creations, so visitors to that scial world could get cred for the games they made, and play each others games.
That series alone generated over a billion user-created gameplays.
Results
- 2B+ annual gameplays
- Cartoon Network's first original virtual world (Mini Match)
- Game Creator franchise — 1B+ user-created gameplays · badge/retention system still informing release decisions
- Design and documentation for CN's badge acheivement system to improve retention
