Valve is looking for a psychologist to join their team and help develop future games and its storefront, Steam. A new listing has been posted to their official site looking for someone to join the studio out of its Bellevue office in Washington state.
“We hire people with broad skill sets who also exhibit deep expertise,” the listing reads. “Psychologists at Valve contribute to a wide variety of initiatives across the company and are trusted to prioritize their work in collaboration with their peers.”
The studio known for Half Life: Alyx, Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has employed a number of psychologists over the years. Valve conducts all sorts of experiments, like one that measures the player’s sweat and level of arousal, to learn about player behavior in order to improve their games. The studio even created a version of Portal 2 that players could control with their eyes after it found that players could move their eyes faster than their hands.
The job listing indicates that candidates will need to “research compelling new hardware technologies” in order to create new experiences for players. Valve received praise for how Half Life: Alyx used virtual reality technology to push the medium forward. The VR shooter was GameSpot’s Game of the Year in 2020.
“Valve brought together different mechanics that we’ve seen in VR games thus far–gun handling, reloading, reactive physics, object interaction, environmental puzzles, horror–and executes on them in top-notch form,” wrote Michael Higham in his Game of the Year writeup about Half Life: Alyx last year. “The result is a cohesive whole, never over-relying on one concept or gimmick and instead making them complement each other from start to finish.”
