Cerise Magazine

Naomi Clark is Content and Community Manager at GameLab, where she’s designed games like Miss Management and LEGO Fever . She’s previously taught history, culture, and sociology of online game worlds at Parsons School of Design, worked as an editor of the online magazine Word, and directed the popular Sissyfight 2000. She also blogs under the name Holly at Feministe and does webdesign for the transgender advocacy nonprofit Sylvia Rivera Law Project.

Ariel Wetzel: How did you get started in both gaming and game development?

Naomi Clark: My family has always been big on games of various sorts — mostly card and board games when I was growing up, though. The exception was my eldest aunt, who was known as the computer-savvy one in my family. In the early 80s, she convinced my parents to buy an Apple II/e, then gave my sister and I a huge box of floppy disks with dozens of games on them… old ones with simple black-and-green pixel graphics, and lots of text adventures… a now-obscure genre that I still love. My sister was still in kindergarten at the time, so I spent a lot more time with the computer and it eventually ended up in my room, where I tried to “program” in BASIC by copying lines of code out of a book. Of course, I didn’t enter everything in correctly, so I encountered my first bugs too. At that point I proved that I was never meant to be a programmer, because I gave up! Like a lot of kids, I knew that there were people who made games for a living, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do that.

I loved lots of different kinds of games growing up. Roleplaying games, made-up card games, party games… Plus, my family spent summers with relatives in Japan, and I lived there for a year when I was 11, so I was exposed to the amazingly addictive Famicom… which I ran into a few years later in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System. My family never had game consoles growing up, and I mostly played digital and online games on a Mac until I was out of college, but I’ve pretty much always been a gamer. As for game development, that’s a weirder story. In the late 90s I was working as one of the editors of an online magazine called WORDl, which published non-fiction short stories as well as interactive art, music, and weird humor. The editor-in-chief (Marisa Bowe) and I had always talked about trying to make an online game, since we were both interested in how people interact socially online. So we put together an online game with the help of an experienced game designer. That game, Sissyfight 2000, was the first one I worked on, and it was surprisingly successful… in fact it’s still online with a dedicated community that still plays.

Not long after, our magazine got shut down and I went to work for a big toy company that makes small plastic bricks, called LEGO. I worked on more games and digital toys there, including a lot of web games with the lead designer of Sissyfight (Eric Zimmerman) and his new company, Gamelab. Fast-forward another few years, and I ended up leaving LEGO to work for Gamelab, right when they were starting to have big success with downloadable games like Diner Dash, designed for less traditional “hardcore” audiences. I’ve been at Gamelab ever since.. I think it’s been three years now!

AW: Can you briefly tell me about some of your current projects at GameLab? That Marxist chicken and the egg game looks especially interesting.

NC: “Egg vs. Chicken” is not exactly a current project — it came out at the beginning of 2006, and it really never rose above cult-hit status. On the other hand, it was the first game I did a major chunk of the game design on, so it will always be near and dear to my heart. The gameplay is kind of a cross between a “defend the castle” game, a color-matching game, and a number-sliding puzzle. You have to slide around groups of eggs inside of a fortress in order to make groups of matching colors and fire little cartoon projectiles at the advancing hordes of chickens. At the same time that we work to make this kind of gameplay concept more fun and engaging, we were also sitting around trying to come up with a story to go along with it. It fell to me to take this weird idea about eggs and chickens fighting and write it into a narrative.

We had already come up with the predictable “argument over which came first” premise, but for whatever reason (probably from reading too much Hegel or something) I decided that it would be a battle throughout history, with the chickens as hegemonic oppressors trying to force the eggs to hatch against their will. There’s a little bit of weird parental / reproductive self-determination in that theme too, although most of the story is about this revolutionary cell of eggs traveling back in time to help eggs of the past struggle for labor rights, religious freedoms, an end to slave labor, and so forth. It was all very, very silly, and I have no idea whether anyone noticed the odd political overtones, references to Che Guevara and James Joyce’s take on history and all that. It got an “E for Everyone” rating from the video game ratings board, so maybe not!

I just finished a couple of other projects in the last few months, including “Miss Management” which has been doing pretty well. It’s a game about a first-time office manager who struggles to help a very dysfunctional team of coworkers get work done and move on with their lives. The story is about as close as you get to a sitcom in video games. I was especially excited to work on Miss Management because we were able to create an ensemble cast of characters who are not only the most important moving parts of the game, but also play out all sorts of conflicts through satirical dialogue–about race, immigration, ageism and sexual harassment as well as more basic workplace stuff like slacking off, smelly food, and control freaks. It’s all pretty light comedy, not exactly hard-hitting on the issues, but video games that actually touch on real-world social issues are hard to find (unless you’re playing a criminal shooting at the cops.) I was really happy to be able to draw some of the more ridiculous experiences that I or my friends have had in office jobs, and then weave all that stuff tightly into the game; the story in this game is far more than just some extra dressing on the side.

Right now I’m working on a project called “Gamestar Mechanic,” which is going to be an educational game website where kids can make their own games using a set of straightforward but very flexible tools. It’s been funded by the MacArthur Foundation and we’re all pretty excited about it, especially because kids have been able to devise some very interesting, creative games with it. There’s not much more I can say right now but we’re aiming for an invite-only beta test some time early next year.

AW: How’d you come to be interested in feminism? What’s some of the writing or work you do regarding gender?

NC: I absorbed feminism from pretty early on in life — my mother, who is a feminist author and translator of Japanese women’s fiction, bopped me on the head as a toddler whenever I started to absorb stupid messages like “mommies stay at home and daddies go to work!” (She claims I said this at the age of two and spent a lot of time trying to make sure I wasn’t getting brainwashed.) I’ve also had the good fortune to have had a lot of amazing women as mentors and colleagues at all the places I’ve worked.

At Gamelab, we kind of fell into this funny new market of “casual games” by having a huge hit with Diner Dash. Although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a calculated move, Diner Dash is about a harried female executive who gets fed up and decides to start her own restaurant, where she both makes management decisions and waits tables. And it turns out that there are actually more female gamers out there than male gamers, according to a recent study that the New York Times covered, if you include all sorts of games, not just the most commonly publicized blockbuster console games. Although Gamelab has always tried to make games as a form of pop culture for an “all kinds of people” audience, in the last few years we’ve been thinking more and more about how to make games that are accessible to people who don’t normally play games, how to make games that appeal both to men and women, etc. Fortunately, unlike many game companies we aren’t a predominantly male organization, we’re pretty close to gender parity and the mixture of men and women is spread across all our departments. It’s pretty cool, and I think one of the results of our diversity (in terms of race as well) is that we bring a lot of different perspectives to our work regardless of whether the project is a small web game or a huge multiplayer world.

As for other work… starting around six or seven years ago, I became more directly involved in feminism, gender politics, and other intersecting social justice causes (of which there are many!) through various online communities, from queer message boards all the way to blogs like Feministe. New York City also has many vibrant, radical activist communities spanning anti-war to labor rights, immigration, prison abolition, the struggles of queer and transgender people, and a lot more. A few years ago I got involved in an organization that a friend of mine started, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. I’m still part of the collective that runs that organization, although I always wish I had more time to devote to that work, which centers around working to ensure that transgender people who are also affected by racism or poverty have access to safe, respectful services and aren’t abused by large institutions.

AW: It sounds like don’t have to check your passion for social justice at the door when you work at GameLab. Elsewhere, have you ever observed a tension between game design and social justice?

NC: I’m not sure tension would be the right word… most of the time, games are designed to be entertainment, first and foremost. Of course, entertainment and play can also be extremely important for teaching concepts and exposing people to new ideas, conveying all sorts of messages. Most games express something, somewhere in how they’re made, about how the designers and developers believe the world works or ought to work. But still, most of the time when someone picks up a game to play, they’re doing it because they are looking for some fun, not because they have to for school or work or other mandatory pursuits. It’s that quality of play and fun that I believe makes games really special — if we lose sight of that when we’re making a game, then we’ve lost a crucial element that makes gaming worthwhile as a medium.

So I guess you could say there are a few different tensions around the whole subject… the obvious one is between the agenda of selling people entertainment and trying to support social justice causes. But even more fundamentally, there’s a tension between trying to create something that has “fun” – the magic stuff that makes games effective at all, makes people want to engage with them – and also communicates or teaches or convinces effectively. I think this is a really difficult thing to do right, especially when you are dealing with serious issues: how do you make something that relies on being fun to engage people, but is trying to talk about something that’s gravely serious like poverty or genocide? I don’t think it’s impossible, but frankly it’s a kind of problem that makes me bite my knuckles anxiously. There are more and more games out there trying to do this, and even though a lot of them either fail at being fun (and therefore aren’t effective and engaging games) or fail at communicating more than the most simplistic messages, I think the experimentation is still worthwhile. We’ll figure it out.

We’re working on this kind of thing at Gamelab too – a couple years ago, in partnership with a local high school program, Unicef and Microsoft, we made a game called Ayiti: the Cost of Life which is about a family struggling with poverty and living conditions in Haiti. It was very tricky for the team that made this game to try to represent the struggles and the difficulty of this kind of situation without being hopelessly bleak and impossible. I think they struck a pretty good balance, a feeling that life on the economic margins of this world can be incredibly hard and far too often fatal, but that there can be joy, possibilities, and hope for change and improvement as well.

AW:What initial approach do you take in developing a new game?

NC: The games that I’ve worked on have always been team efforts – that’s true of most games these days, although there are still many brilliant, multi-talented one-person development teams out there. At Gamelab, even the earliest seeds of ideas for games are sometimes developed in a group of designers and other staff members. On other occasions, we come up with ideas on our own, then bring them into a group where they’re batted around, reshaped, or cross-bred with other ideas to make something new. I feel like a lot of my best creative ideas surface in group discussions, especially since I’m privileged to work with a bunch of inspired original thinkers here at Gamelab, so I’m always eager to do this kind of work. As for the ideas themselves, I think it’s important to try and draw them from all over the place. I’m working on some new game concepts right now where I’ve been thinking about toys from the 1980s, the different ways carnivorous plants trap insects, themes from fantasy novels, Tim Burton movies, vector graphics technology, and web games I played last year. It helps to be interested in a lot of different subjects and to be able to synthesize, put things together in different ways. Wikipedia is incredibly useful for this kind of thing, I have to say! I’ve also been very inspired by veteran game designers like Will Wright, who often shares the genesis of his game ideas at conferences… he gets ideas from everywhere, and he’s a impressively wide-ranging nerd.

The most difficult steps come after you’ve generated a bunch of ideas, however, because you need to refine those ideas and figure out whether they’re actually going to make a fun game that people want to play. This can be a very uncertain and lengthy process, which is why most game companies stick to tried-and-true derivative ideas that they know have worked in other games. At Gamelab, we always try to have at least a few innovative ideas in the mix – doing things a different way even if it’s not wildly unique, or trying out some interesting combination or mash-up that hasn’t been done before. We’ve also made plenty of games that have totally new mechanics, but those are often the most difficult to teach people, and the most difficult to evaluate the true potential of. The really rewarding moments are when you can see a glimpse of where and how the fun is going to emerge from an idea, either by playing the game yourself or watching others play. It’s a magical moment when things kind of snap into place and you know you have “something” even if you’re not sure whether it’s going to be a spark or a bonfire. A lot of the art of game design is about ferreting out that moment and recognizing where it’s coming from.

AW: How did you start blogging at Feministe? Is there anywhere else we can find your writing?

NC: I’ve read and participated in Feministe for quite some time, first by writing comments in response to the other bloggers’ posts. It’s funny, I grew up with what I think of as the pre-blog Internet, where public social communication was mostly based around message boards. So it seems natural to me to write lengthy responses to someone’s original blog post, even though that’s become less common these days as people skim across dozens of blogs regularly. As a result, I got to know some of the Feministe bloggers a little bit, and I substituted as a guest blogger for one of them last summer while she was traveling in Europe. Recently they decided to expand the number of bloggers a bit, and I was invited on permanently. Besides Feministe, you can find my online writing at Gamelab.com sometimes, where we have a blog about various topics related to gaming and the development of our own games. Most of my other writing is actually inside various Gamelab games, especially Miss Management.

AW: Any closing thoughts or things you wanted to say that we didn’t cover?

NC: Since Cerise is a magazine about women and gaming, I just wanted to say, it’s a good time to be a woman in gaming, whether you’re making games or playing them and becoming part of a community of gamers. There’s more and more recognition that there are just as many women playing games as men, and I think we’ll see the landscape of gaming change slowly as the industry realizes and grapples with that. Thanks to many years of chipping away at the boys’ club by a few women, it’s also gradually becoming easier to be a woman in the gaming industry — to the extent that the girls growing up today won’t feel like the exception to the rule if they decide to pursue jobs in gaming.