Mairi Nolan – Womenize! – Inspiring Stories
Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational individuals from games and tech. For this edition, we talked to Mairi Nolan, Director of Play at Studio Heft. She speaks how her unconventional background and design experiences shaped her approach to creating thoughtful, accessible puzzle games, emphasizing the value of cross-disciplinary thinking, learning through constraints, and encouraging aspiring designers to embrace curiosity and diverse influences. Read more about Mairi here:
Hi Mairi! Your journey spans architecture, international law, and game design. Looking back, how did these seemingly unrelated fields influence your approach to creating puzzles, immersive experiences, and storytelling in games?
That’s a great question! When I was studying architecture and international relations I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do yet “in life”. I hadn’t yet even considered game design, let alone specialising in puzzle games as a viable career path. But sinc then, the two degrees have ended up influencing me in really surprising ways! Architecture is a little more straightforward with it’s influence: In my day to day as a game designer whenever I do physical level design, or 3D modelling, or even just plot out the critical path of a player through an environment, I’m using architecture! International Relations on the other hand is more about presentation skills and critical thinking. I specialised in counter terrorism and ended up using my degree in a lot of investigative environments. So it’s no surprise my favourite genre of puzzle game today are mysteries. The best mysteries are informed by real life, and having knowledge of real life cases and how they’re investigated has been immensely influential.
From designing blind-accessible escape games to creating collaborative experiences during lockdown, you’ve tackled projects with unique constraints. What’s a particularly unexpected challenge that taught you something crucial about design, and how did overcoming it shape your career?
I was once commissioned to design a tabletop puzzle game that had to work in multiple languages with no words at all. The unexpected challenge wasn’t removing language, but realising how much we rely on not just language but symbols and markers to be the same between contexts. Early prototypes showed players interpreting the same symbols in completely different ways, or missing core mechanics entirely.
Solving that meant treating the game itself as the tutorial: rules emerged through play, feedback was immediate and unambiguous, and every action had a visible consequence. That experience fundamentally sharpened my approach to design. It’s influenced how I build systems that teach themselves, whether that’s accessible games, onboarding flows, or collaborative experiences across cultures.
You mentor, write, and speak about game and puzzle design, helping others navigate this creative field. For someone exploring a non-traditional route into game design, what lessons from your own unconventional journey do you hope they carry forward?
The most important thing anyone can do as a designer is be inquisitive about the world! Read everything you can get your hands on, watch all the films, play all the games. Develop a strong taste and make the games (or whatever creative field you’re in) that you want to see. Having an unconvential background can only add to the richness of the art you create – so don’t let not having the “right” background stop you.