How a Senior Game Designer turned gaming into a career

When Senior Game Design Director Kristine Golus was whooping her older brother in Street Fighter II, she didn’t know she’d later lead content design for the Xbox dashboard. While players log on to become demon slaying sorcerers or monkey masked car thieves, she’s the main architect behind the home screen’s editorial, putting people on to all that Xbox has to offer. Whether a pithy joke or a massive Starfield Takeover, Kristine’s team showcases the latest games, updates, and customer Rewards.

They provide a platform for game developers and publishers, helping you to discover new games and content that you may not otherwise know about. Xbox’s home editorial experience is vital because it engages with the gamming community and fosters a sense of belonging. For some Xboxers, gaming is a way of life. It’s why Kristine believes that your magical world of joy should begin from the time you launch your game app or console. If home is where the heart is, then Kristine keeps it beating, providing tailored experiences for every precious player.

What do you do?

Right now I lead a talented design team that creates stunning editorial content for all Xbox surfaces. This means that we are responsible for the visual presentation of the games and events that you see on your Xbox dashboard. For example, when Diablo IV came out, we celebrated the moment by taking over the Xbox home screen with a beautiful visual of Lilith and Inarius, two iconic Diablo IV characters. The visual stretched across 2–3 slots of your screen when you turned on your Xbox, which was a one-time experience if you logged in that week. We built this by collaborating with our Marketing Managers and Blizzard to create a final product that looked great. I absolutely adored it. It celebrated the game so well that it’s hard not to be excited when you turn on your Xbox and see it. Folks might also remember some of the memes or odd pun jokes like “you’re finally awake” or “naughty or nice.” Those are absolutely from our team as well. We are always trying to elevate the users’ experience through the content we design.

Can you talk about your team?

As the design lead for Discovery and Subscribe in Xbox Design, my team is made of visual designers. We work closely with game developers and publishers to effectively showcase their products, while also upholding the Xbox brand identity and voice. We do most of the cutting, rearranging, and making sure the dashboard looks great every day for every user. If we have concerns, we do go back to the brand and say, ‘Hey, this is not going to look good in this area. What can we do to make sure this looks fantastic?’ Additionally, we do create our own assets depending on what’s needed. We have even created some of the backgrounds you can use on home ¾some dynamic and some static.

I’m also a design lead for the Rewards Team within the broader Xbox organization. We’re really excited to create a better and easier-to-use experience for our Xbox community.

What are the most important skills needed to do your work?

Always be willing to learn is the most important thing. Even as I morph and change my skill set, growth has always been pivotal. When I started with my current team, I always thought about impact. What do our customers need and want? How can we surprise and delight the customer? How do we measure that we’re successful in creating customer happiness?

A global and inclusive mindset is also important. I didn’t know what geopolitical meant in terms of ensuring that our global perspective is reflective within our content. It has now become a noun and a verb for me. We also have to consider accessibility so every user feels included. On top of that, we must ensure that our editorial is as diverse as it can be, and that more people are able to participate and enjoy the Xbox experience. This is why, for example, we have some folks on our team that aren’t native English speakers. I view diversity as being a very important part of bringing everyone to Xbox, and getting to enjoy different cultures in a way that you might not expect, but still brings you joy.

What made you fall in love with video games?

Before I was born, my father had plans for me to be an investment banker, but when I was a baby, my older brother would take me out of my crib and was like, ‘Hey, I’m playing Frogger right now.’ As I grew older, it was, ‘Hey, I’m playing Metroid. You need to watch. I’m playing Zelda. You need to watch.’ It was always that scenario. I was surrounded by video games, so unsurprisingly, I started playing video games when I was really young, and I loved them. It was an interesting problem because there were times when my brother would be like, ‘Yo, time to play Street Fighter,’ and I was like, ‘I’m making brownies for our parents coming home tomorrow.’ He’s like ‘Oh, you know, my friends can’t beat me. You gotta play. Let’s go!’ Then I’d just kill him twice in two rounds, walk back and finish my brownies. His friends were like, ‘Your sister is a monster.’ I just love playing games and it was 100% my brother’s fault.

What exposed you to game design?

That would be an old college friend. I hadn’t considered game design or even games as a job, but when he said he was going to become a game designer, I was like, ‘Well, what the heck is that?’ He started going over what game design is, in terms of world building and all the different pieces of game design. I thought it sounded really interesting and I told him, ‘Maybe I’ll go do that too.’

Then he said something that I’ll never forget. He said, ‘Well for you to get in, you should probably learn how to do web design and maybe QA (quality assurance) because you’re not going to land a game design role outright.’ I was determined to prove him wrong. I started off as a StarCraft pro-gamer in college but decided not to go to Korea.

I wanted to finish my degree and go after game design, so I used being a professional StarCraft player to jumpstart my career. I had a goal of challenging myself to see what I could do, what I was capable of. Whatever game I created had to be a different platform or different genre or I had to have a different role. I needed to learn. I needed to grow. I needed to do everything that was exciting that I could get my hands on. I just kept going and it was really fun.

What advice would you have for other aspiring game designers?

Everything in life in some way, shape or form is a game, even if you’re not making a game, the way that you look at a job 100% can be gamified almost regardless of what job you choose.

If you insist on joining the games industry as a game designer, learn everything you can about games and start creating one! It’s hard to land a job and even more difficult to break in, so use every option available to gain an edge. Good luck!