Tuesday 13 November 2007

Girls for Games and Games for Girls

This is partly for my own interest, to scrounge around and see what games out there had a female lead designer - and what kind of games. I don't care who made a game if it's fun, but it's interesting to see, isn't it?

So, first, the obvious links:

Hanako Games
Amaranth Games
Tale of Tales (You may know them from 'The Endless Forest')

Some of you will definitely remember names like Roberta Williams (King's Quest) and Lori Cole (Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory) from the old Sierra days.

In "games specifically intended for girls" there's Brenda Laurel, from Purple Moon (possibly others there as well). And Her Interactive, which makes the Nancy Drew games.

WAY WAY BACK in ancient Atari History, we had Dona Bailey and Carol Shaw (Centipede, 3d Tic Tac Toe, River Raid). Slightly more recent than that, Amy Briggs wrote 'Plundered Hearts' in the text adventure age (was also specifically targeted at women). Digging around, I can also find a Nicky Robinson, who worked on several games but is credited as a major designer/developer on "Mail Order Monsters", which I've never heard of.

In freeware, "Emily Short" (apparently not her real name, perhaps to avoid conflict with the day job?) is considered one of the top figures of modern Interactive Fiction.

I can find a few people who worked as designers on some MMORPGs, notably Shadowbane, but those teams are so huge I don't think that counts. There are many more women who work IN the games industry, but I'm particularly interested in games primarily created/directed by women. Throw me some links, people?

4 comments:

Greg Squire said...

Not sure how much of a design role she had exactly, but there's Margaret Wallace who co-founded and was CEO of Skunk Studios (also now co-founded and is CEO of RebelMonkey).

http://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretwallace
http://games.skunkstudios.com/about_us
http://www.rebelmonkey.com/about.html

largemarge said...

There's Stevie Case, who worked at Ion Storm with John Romero and crew. I think she was a level designer.

Michael Samyn said...

Tracy Fullerton is designing The Night journey for/with Bill Viola.

And of course there's Jade Raymond. She was the producer on the recently released Assassin's Creed but she seems to have been closely involved with the design.

And wasn't Rainbow Six designed by a woman?

miyamoto-SAN said...

Another freeware author is my friend Komera (real name: Kelly Lea Harrismith), who made a pretty great Ohrrpgce RPG named Wingedmene, among other games. (The Ohrrpgce is a RPG-Maker like engine.) She's also working with me on my current game.