SINCE YOU ASKED

I graduated from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon in 2014, at (ahem)-years old, after 35 years as a successful Broadway stage manager. I 'm on a journey to to create in a truly new space: Virtual Theatre.

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I am using my extensive professional writing, crafting, production, performing, and management skills - along with my more recent Game and Interactive Design training in art, animation, some coding - to find my way to this terra incognita. It is there I envision creating a style of interactive virtual performance - originally prototyped from 2006-2010 on Second Life at my own in-world build, the Caledon Gaiety Theatre - that I believe can offer Players an immersive transporting, transferential experience entirely unlike what game culture has heretofore offered. Why is there only ONE game culture - male-fantasy born and bred? My adventure thus far has been predicated on the deeply held belief (and some persuasive data) that women have very different desires and responses when offered a fantasy (not-Fantasy, per se) environment - as do non-game-culture, non-players who are not being addressed by the commercial medium at all. I am making games - slowly, from the art-part-out- for them, for us. I am using what I know, the making of Entertainment, to reach the smart, creative, inherently social, increasingly-technologically sophisticated audience that is - not just discriminated against, but otherwise invisible and ignored - by so many of the masters (and mistresses!) of the commercial game industry.

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While a student at ETC I was given the opportunity to read, hear, observe, and dialogue with some of the most insightful and inspiring thinkers from all spaces in videogames and interactive media. The program allotted us a budget for academic travel, and made it easy for us to duck out of the Ivory Tower to get a sense of the real world; they tried to make sure we got blown away by that world when we briefly re-entered it, too.

You know: sometimes it's imperative -- life or death! -- to the pursuit of a dream that the dreamer join in the shouts and murmurs and tears and fist-pumps of the others who share the dream. Why else would Con Culture have exploded in our current discombobulated universe? The Internet itself is not enough to create REAL community - it's all about theatre, and church, and the village green, and the campfire.

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon..." - E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

Since graduation I have been working remotely for Big Fish Games' (www.bigfishgames.com) Narrative Design division in Seattle, localizing text and dialogue for hidden-object story games. My arrangement with them echoes (rather pleasingly) my immigrant great-grandmother's piecework. I have been credited as Writer/BETA-editor on 10 or so titles* thus far, all originally scripted in Russian. Now, there's no denying BFG is big and commercial - recently acquired by Churchill Downs Incorporated for $885,000,000 - but here's the thing: the demographic for is primarily Women 35 and up; their art and story-styles are unequivocally feminine and literary. I'm learning SO much -- mostly about how much more is possible. How can this GORGEOUS, expensive, powerful, narrative-driven medium be officially dismissed as "casual" - or is it just the Player demographic that has been denigrated and dismissed with that term? This gig is first base for me in my game creation journey, and the Inside Baseball vantagepoint has been invaluable to me and the work I want to do in both game design and storytelling.

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At ETC, I was assigned to teams working on creating web-apps, iOS-apps, and site-specific interactive experiences for clients such as Carnegie Museums of Art + Natural History; rock band OKGo; and Children's Museum of Pittsburgh MAKESHOP. Educational impact was perhaps the goal - for the institutions and for us as students. Were these great projects I want you to go look at? Uh, no - but as a "Second Career" grad student I probably had the best advantage over my more age-appropriate classmates: I have failed bigger and better than anybody who has lived less, and can learn the hell out of each and every failure.

When I do not have a Big Fish deadline looming, I am working furiously on my own game, currently titled Body & Soul. It is a PC Adventure Game reminiscent of old-timey genre games, plus a little of the Big Fish puzzle model (I steal whatever I find!) - with the added mechanic of Virtual Performance. Body & Soul has two playable female protagonists, two best friends on a journey, accurate period setting, sharp dialogue, tight plot, unique musical design. What will be its impact? Finally proving that there are more worlds available other than the pop-culture-, violence- and combat-dominated one in which every woman is expected to be, at the very least, a Badass, or a Superhero, even if that is Not Her Dream. A lot of people are talking about Women in Gaming; I say let's take our ball and go elsewhere, and play the way we want to. Let's not just talk, let's make.

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