Liz Fiacco: Getting Real World Skills from Playing Video Games

Liz Fiacco is a creative entrepreneur and game designer, and co-founder of Fallstreak Studio. She started Fallstreak Studio in 2011, they raised more than $20k through crowd-funding to fund the commercial release of the game that features a plucky little gear who must surmount big problems in the steampunkish world of a gear-crushing toy factory.

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ABOUT Liz Fiacco

“Liz Fiacco is an entrepreneur and game designer with experience at game studios such as Obsidian Entertainment and Nickelodeon Virtual Worlds.

Liz maintains that through a game, you can learn from failure. Additionally with technology today, video games can actually simulate extremely complex systems and they’re interactive which means students or players can change stuff about these systems and then see the repercussions of their actions in the world.

All this power is in video games but you can’t get a transferable skill from it unless the mechanics actually reflect real skills in real content. She believes that Games are actually the perfect medium to hone transferable skills.

She says, “if you think about something like Rock Band, eventually, you’re going to learn how to do real syncopated rhythm and you’re gonna learn some common drum techniques. The power of these games comes from their rapid teach and test cycles. A player learns something new and immediately has to put it into practice.”

Recently, Liz and her co-founders Jessica Kernan and Lauren Gragg were recognised as a part of 2013’s “Twenty Women to Watch” in the OC Metro, Orange County’s business magazine.”

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