Who We Work With
Welcome!
I'm Chris, a strategist, advisor, speaker, and coach.
Global Strategic Impact: I've briefed high-level leaders including a prime minister, a US Navy admiral, and multiple consul generals on how my areas of expertise intersect with solving complex human behavior challenges.
Expert in Engagement Design: I leverage over two decades of game design and engagement expertise to help organizations like Quizlet transform their user experiences, driving measurable improvements in engagement, retention, and business outcomes.
Game Industry Veteran: I've shaped critically acclaimed titles at industry giants including Electronic Arts, Maxis, and PlayFirst, pioneering engagement strategies that reached millions of users.
Strategic C-Suite Advisor: I partner with executives at global leaders like Toyota, Microsoft, and Santander Bank to transform user engagement and drive innovation through evidence-based behavioral design.
Recognized Industry Expert: My insights on engagement and game design have been featured across major media outlets including Forbes, NBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Stanford Graduate Educator: I teach cutting-edge engagement principles at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, preparing tomorrow's innovators to design more effective learning experiences.
Testimonials
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We partnered with Chris to ensure our product decisions were aligned with driving student learning outcomes. His deep expertise in motivation, gamification, game mechanics, and learning science was instrumental in shaping our approach. He was a thoughtful and collaborative partner throughout, helping us build more engaging and effective learning experiences.
Meghann Lomas, Sr. Director of Product Management at Quizlet
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Chris's expertise in game design, coupled with his deep understanding of behavioral psychology and neuroscience, has enabled us to bring a transformative approach to our educational platform. Chris is not only an accomplished game designer; he's also a visionary who revolutionizes how we perceive learning and engagement.
Laura Malcolm, co-founder Kinjo and Civitas Learning
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We initially hired Chris as an Engagement Specialist, but quickly realized his skills as a strategic thinker, coming up with creative solutions to help drive business goals. Whatever challenges we throw at Chris, he is able to execute them quickly and efficiently with kindness.
Jamie Turner, former chief operations officer, Digital Media Academy
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We brought Chris on board to develop the concept for a casual game in the climate change space. Chris generated the initial IP and became an instrumental member of our team in a matter of mere weeks. Chris has the very strong ability to deconstruct things, identify what makes existing games successful or not, and refine these components to reach new goals.
Christian Weirich, climate change CEO/founder
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Working with Chris was a great and valuable experience. He helped us take a more thoughtful approach to motivation and gamification in product design and strategic planning. He has a great way of making complex ideas feel practical and actionable. His workshops and our discussions made game design principles easy to understand and apply, and his collaborative style led to real useful, thought provoking, and generative jam sessions.
Leo Basanez, Director of Product Design, Quizlet
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What impressed me about Chris was that he showed a real passion for learning about and adding to the educational design we are doing at GSE. And he openly shared years of his game design experience to provide a new lens for my students to view their work. Chris demonstrated his passion and commitment as someone who wants to affect change in the world.
Karin Forssell, Director of LDT Master’s Program at Stanford University Graduate School of Education
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Chris is smart, personable and brings an impressive set of skills to the table. He is a great person to collaborate with---I always felt more creative around him. From an interaction design point of view, the deliverables Chris would provide gave me the structure and constraints I needed but left plenty of room for creativity and flexibility as the design evolved.
Arena Reed, product designer, ex-IDEO
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Chris is my *go-to* guy for anything and everything related to games and how game principles and frameworks could be intelligently applied to education and wellness. I can ask him anything and he can give me a thoughtful answer or quickly surface the relevant research. He has deep empathy and understanding of the user experience and is able to get inside a player's head to tap into her aspirational goals.
Margarita Quihuis, private diplomat and keynote speaker
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What an absolute pleasure it is to work with Chris! He is accomplished game designer at the top of his game professionally, with an easy-going attitude and good sense of humor to boot. I learned so much from him and from seeing the way that he worked, when we were working on a mobile game together. He is really passionate about game design and that is really inspiring. Most impressive is the way that he is a virtual fountain of creative ideas. He pulled together a storyline, characters, and game play designs seemingly out of thin air for our project. A rare gem!
Maya Gorton, product design director
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I had the pleasure of working closely with Chris Bennett and was consistently impressed by his exceptional skills in driving engagement through clever design and facilitation. Chris is a wonderfully engaging speaker and facilitator. His ability to quickly create new intellectual property and foster community around important educational issues is impressive.
Sarah Mae Abji-Endicott, former chief product and marketing officer, Digital Media Academy
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I worked with Chris on a project combining games with environment protection and it was a pleasure to work with him. He is very creative and open-minded, yet with a great business perspective in mind. His decades of experience in games and leadership was a great value to the whole team.
Katharina Greggersen, former head of studio, Rovio
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I appreciated Chris’s ability to quickly bring his wealth of game design experience to bear in creating the initial design spec as well as finding creative ways to merge real-world rewards into the core game loop and metagame. He also designed an entire cast of characters for the game, with backstories and design comps for each one, along with sample game locations and scenario ideas.
Nick Edgar, senior lead software developer
“Gamification is really about using people’s natural motivation to make experiences fun and enjoyable.”