Prof. Dr. Christof Rezk-Salama

Professor Dr. Christof Rezk-Salama studied information technology at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen / Nuremberg, Germany, and subsequently obtained his PhD with honours. After working as a design engineer at Siemens Medical, he completed his postdoctoral qualification at the University of Siegen in 2009. He then taught and conducted research as a professor at the Media Design University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf in the department of game design. In 2012, he accepted a professorship for game development at the department of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany.

Red Dot: How will games and their designers evolve on mobile devices?
Christof Rezk-Salama: A difficult question. The truly innovative ideas in gaming tend to come from small, independent developers. The gaming market for mobile platforms is by now so saturated that it is not the most innovative game concepts that make it, in my opinion, but rather those that can achieve greater visibility due to enormous marketing budgets.

What is the likely future job description of a game designer?
Good game design is characterised by intuitive ease of use, barrierfree access, intrinsic motivation and, above all, fairness for widely different ways of playing, which is achieved through dynamic balancing. Analysing all of this and applying it to technological devices are the core competencies required for digitalisation, in my view. I therefore expect that game designers will be represented more in all areas of digital transformation.