Alexandra Hoth

Perhaps my love for video games came from my love for imagination. As a child, I did not just play pretend or use my imagination lightly – I lived in it. I wrote short stories with fervor and lost myself in books; I disappeared in kids shows like Avatar the Last Airbender and I melted into music. And, when I played video games, there was no stopping me. It was like a home for my mind.

From a young age, video games have always been able to provide me what reality could not. Whether it was playing low-res games on the Playstation 2, or playing Pokemon Emerald on the Gameboy Advance, or playing whichever game from the entire suite of games my mother and father had bought for me on my DS Lite, to playing Call of Duty at nine-years-old with grown men and losing disastrously and discovering my favorite game of all time at the same age, Fallout 3, and all the years which followed, video games and I have a special connection.

After a series of fumbles with my academic career in my late teens and early twenties, when I saw that Long Island University had the option for prospective students to learn digital game design, it was like something inside of me clicked into place. I knew that in my heart, this was for me.

Now, two years later, I am a proud graduate of LIU with my B.F.A. in digital game design, having graduated with high honors and as a part of 2 honor societies.

However, I am not only a game designer with a love for video games, I am also a graphic designer with a love for video games! Largely self-taught, I spent a lot of time in school taking electives in graphic design to expand my overall knowledge and apply graphic design principles in my own upcoming projects. Although, being a game design student inhibited me from taking fundamental graphic design classes, which left me with having to teach myself lots of fundamental graphic design concepts on my own. Thankfully, I met a few graphic design students who helped me along the way and have since become great friends and confidants to me with my work in the field.

It is with thanks to great friends and hard work, I am happy to say that I am now an entry-level graphic designer, available to work freelance on (almost) all things graphic design.

Regardless, while my academic journey has been long and challenging, I am so proud of who I am today because of it.

I look forward to my future in game design, and my future in graphic design, too.