From Gamer to Game Designer: One Woman’s Story
July 2007 Issue
![Cerise Issue 3 [July 2007]](http://cerise.theirisnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/cerisejul07_tn.jpg)
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Sunpaint T-shirts
- Gaming in the Media: To Wii, or Not to Wii?
Interviews
- Jess Hartley [Tabletop RPG writer]
- Robyn Bremner [Game tester, Capcom Interactive Canada]
Articles
- Inviting More People to the Game
Author: Cherie Thomason
- Racial Inclusiveness in Gaming
Author: Latoya Peterson
- Does Inclusive Game Design Make Sense?
Author: Andrea Rubenstein
- The Women of Twilight Princess
Author: Ariel Wetzel
Cherie proposes some simple ways to make games more inclusive.
Latoya explores the problems that the industry has with race and proposes some solutions.
Andrea takes on some of the common stumbling blocks that hinder inclusive game design.
Ariel breaks down the major women of Twilight Princess and examines how the game uses female characters in general.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
- Nintendo Wii and Wii Sports
- Shadowrun
- Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side First Love
- Retro Review: The Dreadnaught Factor
I have a confession: I’m not a game designer… yet. I know what the title says, but this story, like every story, is a work in progress. It all started with a dream, but with every passing day it’s one step closer to becoming a reality. It’s my journey through life as a gamer, as a feminist, and as a game designer in training.
Nurturing My Inner Gamer
I’ve been a gamer since the days of the Apple II GS. I remember sitting in school playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Number Munchers, and later, King’s Quest. With consoles I started with an original NES and Dragon Warrior. I was so young that my mom played with me; she controlled the actual character and I told her what to do and where to go. One of her favorite stories is about how a family friend would call me up for advice when he and his friends were stuck in Zelda. He was a teenager and I was still in single digits.
The first best friend I ever had would come over to my place and we would play whatever game we were into at the time until the wee hours of the morning. I remember my dad coming into the playroom at like 4am once, in his underwear no less, to tell us to go to bed. I would have been more mortified, but my friend and I had such a giggle fest over it that it didn’t seem so embarrassing anymore. My foray into video games didn’t end there; indeed, most of my friends throughout middle and high school shared my interest in gaming. I remember becoming friends with one guy in my class because we shot the shit about Nintendo and its upcoming console, the N64. While the so-called ‘normal’ kids were out doing whatever the devil kids did in those days, we were at one of our houses gossiping about the latest RPG or playing Dark Stalkers against each other.
Deciding on Game Design
In my high school days, I knew I was a gamer, but I didn’t yet know I wanted to be a game designer. In those days I wanted to write comics, and maybe have those comics be turned into games. I’m not entirely sure when my plans changed and I started thinking that it would be nice to create video games.
I think it was partly due to my increasing frustration that even in the 21st century finding a video game with characters who represented me was difficult. Sure, there were plenty of white women to choose from… if I didn’t mind them being meek magic users or femme fatales with breasts that came in shapes and moved in ways not found in nature. And even then, it was clear that those women weren’t there for me, but for the man that the company obviously assumed I was. I’m a firm believer in the old adage, “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” and, despite my hopes for it to be otherwise, it was becoming increasingly clear that the saying held true for my beloved hobby.
Another part was discussing game design with my cousin. We would play the same games, often playing together, and then have long discussions deconstructing the merits and flaws of our current obsession. Part of this discussion involved what we would do if we were to design a game of this type, and it got me thinking, “Well, why don’t I design a game?”
Starting Down the Path
Deciding to become a game designer was the easy part, figuring out how to get there was not so much. You see, the North American gaming industry seems to approach game design in a rather organic way, meaning that there is not any specializations that focus on game design, and getting into the position seems to come from having seniority in one of the other positions on staff. Not exactly the best way for someone like me, who has no interest in the programming or CG aspect of game creation (the two fields that all gamer colleges offer, with level design being the only other one I could find) and no published stories or major in Creative Writing that would allow me to become a story writer. The only thing I had going for me was learning Japanese, but I quickly realized that not only did I have no interest in translating, but becoming a translator, even the lower level kind that requires only the JLPT2, was not a walk in the park.
While I was casually Googling information on well-known schools like DigiPen and Guildhall with no luck in regard to game design, I got to thinking. In North America, technical schools don’t really mean much. My cousin went to a game college and didn’t get much out of it. Now he’s at SFU majoring in Math and Computer Science. Even if I did find a school that taught what I wanted, if it didn’t have name recognition like the two I listed above, it still would probably not mean much to a game company, especially if the school wasn’t accredited.
Then it hit me: technical schools in Japan are as popular, if not more so, than universities. They are seen as a valid way to get experience for your chosen career and there are tons of them. I did some casual Googling for it, and ended up finding an online FAQ that had a section devoted to game design. I almost died of happiness. So the next semester of school, I started talking to my teacher about it.
Despite a miscommunication in the beginning (I had forgotten how to say “game design” in Japanese, and my teacher wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in relation to games), she signed me up on a list and soon after the schools started sending me information. At first I collected all the schools that had the program I wanted. There were so many of them that they filled my large backpack. Of course, when I started going through them I was able to immediately cut out about half because they were really bad schools. I had to cut out one or two because they didn’t say anything about whether or not they admitted foreigners, and I decided that I had plenty of other options without having to e-mail them about something so basic.
Finally I narrowed my choice down to two: HAL, which is a famous school with branches in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, and a smaller school called Tokyo Net Wave. Applications go off in September and I’ll have to take the entrance exams (a written test, an essay, and an interview designed to see if I speak Japanese at the appropriate level) some time after that.
Into the Future
I don’t know where the future will lead. What will studying game design be like? What kind of job will I be able to get afterward? Can I hack learning in a language that I will only have seriously studied for about two years? I don’t know. But I do know that game design has become a passion of mine and becoming a game designer has become one of my dreams. No matter what obstacles I encounter in the future, I feel better knowing that I’m firmly on the path to fulfilling that dream.
