He took college-level art classes in high school and majored in art at the University of Pennsylvania, but it didn't truly satisfy him. "Look, I can paint images on paper and I can enjoy it," he said, "but ultimately I felt like I was reshuffling a deck that had been created by other people, and there's thousands of years of painting, and ... I had the itch to make culture that was genuinely new."
After college, Zimmerman started designing amateur tabletop board games with an old friend. He spent hours writing rulebooks, testing his designs and making revisions. As an artist, he never felt time melting away like that.
"They never got published," he said of the games, "but it was really the experience of working on the design that was just incredibly important for me." Shortly after, he enrolled in a master's degree program in art and technology at Ohio State University.
Recognition didn't come overnight for Zimmerman. "There was no big moment," he said. "It's not like I did a game that was as huge as Sim City or Myst, and suddenly everyone knew who I was from that thing."
In fact, his introduction to the game industry began modestly with an internship at R/GA's interactive unit in New York, though he was hired a few months later. At the time, Zimmerman thirsted for more involvement in game design discussions, but felt like an industry outsider. Game Developers Conference organizers rejected his pitches for years.
"Basically, [the pitches] were quite academic and more theoretical, and none of the people doing it knew me or any of my work," Zimmerman said. "They thought, 'Who's this guy who thinks he knows something about game design?'"
So Zimmerman learned. After overhearing two R/GA employees talking about a possible game design class at New York University, he and game designer Frank Lantz offered to teach it. To prepare, they combed library databases, discovering game theory classics such as Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens from 1938. It was a hugely influential experience. "Meeting Eric and talking to him about games," Lantz said, "was a big turning point for me, personally, in the way I thought about game design in my work."
Teaching also built important contacts for Zimmerman. Peter Lee was one of his first students at NYU, and after Lee graduated, they began to collaborate. Zimmerman had started a company with two friends from graduate school but left to consult and design games as a freelancer. Lee was a systems administrator for a medical communications company. They co-founded Gamelab in their spare time in 2000.
Nick Fortugno worked for Gamelab in the early years, and he witnessed the seeds of Rules of Play brewing in Zimmerman's head. "In retrospect, I can see that Eric was trying to dissect games as he was making them," Fortugno said. "The terminology of the book was something that Eric incorporated into philosophy, and it spread through Gamelab."
