Game Design Researcher · Elysium Interactive

We’re hiring a Game Design Researcher to shape the systems at the heart of our Minecraft network. The role sits where design craft meets research: economies, progression, and quests players will live in for years.

What you’ll work on

Core systems design: economies, markets, and sinks; progression and pacing; quests and content; the player experience that ties them together
Simulation-driven design: testing systems against simulated player populations before players ever touch them
Live balance: post-release, every balance change a hypothesis, and real play the experiment that settles it
Agent methods: multi-agent RL and LLM-driven agent societies in simulated MMO-style economies — populations that play, trade, specialize, and find the exploits before players do

Who we’re looking for

Systems intuition: built in sandbox and MMO economies, or in economics, complex systems, or games research — what matters is reasoning well about players and incentives
Design sensibility across economy design, progression, quests, and player UX — able to articulate why a system feels good, not just that it does
Analytical rigor: comfortable reasoning quantitatively about game systems, from back-of-envelope EV math to building small models
Fluency working with AI agents: directing them through research and modeling work for real leverage, reviewing their output with a critical eye, and knowing when a problem deserves your own head

Nice-to-haves

Minecraft literacy: fluent enough in the game and its player culture to hold your own in a design discussion
The design literature: game balance, virtual economies, virtual worlds, player motivation, game analytics
The agent literature: generative agent societies, open-ended game-playing agents, memory and reflection architectures
Simulation and agent methods: agent-based modeling, economic simulation, RL and reward design, LLM-based agents
Python and the data stack: modeling, statistics, causal reasoning, large gameplay datasets
Live-game balance: tuning a game in response to how it’s really played
Economics: market design, incentives, monetary policy in closed economies
Content design: quest writing, tutorialization, onboarding