Designer, Artist, Author, Teacher, Researcher – Celia Pearce has done it all.  Hear what she has to say about her life in the game industry.

by Louis Bedigian

“I still can't believe it when I walk into game studios and see one woman for every hundred men. It feels like we're still living in the dark ages.”

Can one person do it all?  History tells us the answer is no, but that hasn’t stopped Celia Peace from trying.  She holds the position of Research and External Relations Manager for the Arts Layer of Cal-(IT)² (California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology).  She also holds the position of Associate Director of Game Research at the University of California Irvine, where she has also taught game design and interactive art.

Celia is the author of The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution.

She produced a highly-acclaimed game conference, Entertainment in the Interactive Age, for the University of Southern California.

She helped to develop an MFA Program in Interactive Media for the School of Cinema-Television.

Her consulting firm, Celia Peace & Friends, has given sound advice to Walt Disney Imagineering, Universal Parks, and Lego Toys, among many others.

What does a woman with so many accomplishments have to say about the game industry?  GameZone Online spoke with her to find out.

You're a game designer, artist, researcher, teacher and author of The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution.  Is there any part of the game industry you haven't tackled?

Celia Pearce: Well, it depends what you mean by "tackled"? In terms of writing, probably not, although clearly there has been an emphasis on games that integrate narrative in some way, issues around gender play patterns, and more recently, multi-player games.

In terms of making games, I've tended to work in alternative genres, mostly multi-player. A lot of the work I have done has been R&D that never really saw the light of day. My biggest success in terms of a produced game was Virtual Adventures, the six-person theme park attraction I creative directed for Iwerks in 1993.

These days, I really like working in the context of arts research, which combines my interest in advancing technology, but in a way that's driven by experience design and content. Right now, I'm working on an environmental game to help people understand, I guess I think about games as being a lot more than simply entertainment.

Let's just say you're not likely to see any of my work on the shelves of Wal-Mart any time soon.

How do you balance all that you do?  Which tasks come first?

CP: Priorities tend to be driven by opportunities. Although it's hard to keep up with all the opportunities that cross my path. In addition, I work with a team of people so I try to pay attention to what they're doing, and what they need, and try to connect them with opportunities as well. I'm definitely a multi-tasker, which I guess sort of goes with the territory of being a gamer.

Which came first for you: game design, researching, or...?

CP: For me, they are totally intertwined. My first game-related job involved doing a lot of research, developing techniques for flow-charting and specking games. After that, I spent about two and a half years heading up a play-testing program. This was incredibly useful and I think really created the foundation for everything I've done. A lot of the new design work I'm doing is directly inspired by the research I've done into game culture. I'm especially encouraged by the level of creativity and initiative today's game players take. They are all about creating their own entertainment experience, which makes my job even more fun.

Who did you work for as a game designer – what were your duties?

CP: Well my first major job was for Edwin Schlossberg Incorporated in New York. I was originally hired as a writer, but it became very evident that describing games required co-designing them. I always worked with team, so I learned how to describe things really clearly. I also spent a lot of time early on trying to understand the nature of games, their "gameness," if you will.  What was a game and what was not a game? What were the nature of rules?

After that, I took on the job of running all the play tests. Only this wasn't like the play tests people do now. It was more what you would call "formative evaluation," really an integral part of the design process. We mocked a lot of games up with paper and pencil, and made a lot of very funky prototypes, just to find out if our games were fun.

Since they were all multi-player games (and this was in the mid-eighties, so pretty advanced for the time), it was especially important to understand the social mechanic of the game. Me and my team would mock the games up, and then bring in play testers from our card file. Afterward, we would write a report and submit it to the design team with conclusions and recommendations. It was actually pretty scientific. Later, there were prototype games, which included diagnostics which we could print out and analyze to understand what was going on in the game.

Eventually I evolved from play-testing and writing to be a full-fledged producer (our term for a game designer.) I would write the design spec, and then work with the other teams, artists and architects (because this was for a night club/attraction), and my main job was to make sure all the pieces fit together, and that the game design was consistent at every level.

What did you gain from your experience as a game designer?

CP: Probably the most important thing I learned from that first job was working with a team. One really tough lesson was being able to throw away a draft. I used to really labor over my design documents, until I realized that the first one is always going to get edited to death, so it's better to just get it out fast, and get more fussy in the later drafts. I also learned how to integrate all the different parts, which was particularly useful later when I worked on Virtual Adventures, since the team was geographically distributed. We really weren't even using e-mail at that point (1993), but did everything by fax and FedEx. Having a really good process for review and revisions made a big difference to create a final product that had a consistent look and feel.

What was the most rewarding aspect of being a game designer?  What was most disappointing?

CP: Being a game designer is about the most fun job there is because I love to collaborate, and I really like the whole process of taking an idea out of people's heads and then translating it into reality. I love brainstorming and refining the idea. It's also really interdisciplinary. It never gets boring because there are so many aspects. Probably the most rewarding thing of all is watching players. When I worked on Virtual Adventures, I spent hours and hours hiding in the shadows in the back of the little submarine pod watching all these groups play this game. Everyone makes it their own, and that's really the biggest perk of all.

As far as disappointments, probably the biggest one is that the game industry has gotten so boring. Ten years ago, it seemed like every new product that came out, for better or worse, invented a new genre. Some of the stuff was awful, but you know Myst, Doom, 7th Guest, all the Indiana Jones games—those games were watersheds. Now it's just the same old thing but with more polygons and better textures. I'm always glad to see something like The Sims suddenly appear, which defies all the odds and breaks into a new audience.

I also find it very challenging to be, as I like to call it, a "person of gender," in the game industry. Last year, the Game Developer's Conference offered women's T-shirts for the first time. But they only made 30. It amazes me that after all this time, people still shrug in bafflement when you talk about games that are more appealing to women. I still can't believe it when I walk into game studios and see one woman for every hundred men. It feels like we're still living in the dark ages. And I don't mean the Dark Ages of Camelot. This is one area where game research has a leg up – there are a lot more women in the academic side of gaming. Believe it or not, it's a lot less hostile environment for us.
 
What game-related things are you researching?

CP: Right now I'm doing some cybersociology around inter-game immigration. I've developed this research avatar character, and she/we are currently engaged in studying a community of about 300 players who immigrated from Uru to There when they shut down the Uru Live server last March. One of the challenges is that when you engage in research that way, you really have to become part of the game, part of the performance as it were. So part of the challenge has been developing this character, and knowing full well that she has become part of the story she is telling.

Have you been surprised, intrigued and/or disappointed by any of your findings?

CP: The whole thing has been incredibly fascinating. First of all, the game was in beta for about six months, and only live as a commercial game for three. But these people developed such an amazing affinity with each other, especially because many of them were Myst fans prior to playing Uru, so they had this set of shared values. They are also a lot older than the typical online game player, and more than half of them are women. When they entered into There, they used the player creation tools in the game to recreate as much of their "lost world" as possible.  In a sense, they created an Uru ethnic neighborhood inside There.

I actually came upon this group totally by accident—originally I was trying to locate some players from The Sims Online, in part because I wanted to understand their mafia culture. But every time I logged on, there was no one there. I located a Sims refugee group in There (which numbers about 800), and that's what got me onto the immigration thing. They were the ones who told me about the Uru folks. It's really a lot of detective work. Quite a lot of fun, and the people I'm studying have been incredibly helpful and forthcoming.

Are you going to compile your findings for another book?

CP: I doubt it will result in a whole book, but probably a significant paper somewhere. My next book project, which is currently in the works, is going to be about game mod art, which has been an area of research for quite a while.

What kinds of things do you hope to research in the future?

CP: I'm planning to do a study of romance in online games with a colleague. I'm particularly interested in people who have long-term in-game commitments that don't extend outside of the game. I think the nature of these relationships is quite nuanced, and it will be interesting to explore them in more depth.

Regarding your current book, The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution, what is it about?  What topics are covered?

CP: Well one of my friends describes it as a book about everything. It really covers a lot of ground.

When you go searching for a new and exciting game, what are the things that you look for?  What entertains you?

CP: Lately, I've been playing mostly multi-player games. I think mostly what I look for is a compelling world to be inside, and interesting social interactions. To me, it's sort of like a traveling experience—I want to see some scenery, discovery cool things, meet interesting people. I really love games where player creativity plays a major role—I really enjoy looking through the player auctions in There, and checking out people's houses.

One thing [they] seem to be getting better at is creating a good newbie experience. This is important for me because I have to try a lot of different games, so the entry level process is critical. I try a lot of games, but very few keep my attention. When they do, I'm addicted.

Are you happy with the current state of the game industry?

CP: Yes and no. I think the technologies are really "there." The game I did for Iwerks in 1993 ran on a flight simulator and cost 1.3 million dollars. My gaming PC can do pretty much everything that system could do. As I mentioned earlier, I think the lack of innovation is really ridiculous. Everything is a movie license or a sequel. Once in a while you get something good. I think the corporate consolidation is also really impacting innovation, and making it harder and harder to take risks. There's been a spate lately of corporate conglomerates closing down their "golden egg" studios. It's really stupid. I think it's really going to hurt business in the long run.

Many game developers are miffed by the lack of support that they get from publishers to try unique ideas.  Many would rather stick to the mold than break it with a revolutionary title like Pikmin.  Do you think this will ever change?

CP: Well this is precisely what inspired us to produce ALT+CTRL, our festival of independent games that runs October 5-November 24. My co-organizers, Robert Nideffer and Antoinette LaFarge, had produced a very successful game art show at UCI's Beall Center for Art and Technology in 2000. We really wanted to create an environment that would cultivate innovation, try to encourage new ways to thinking about games.

I think the hope of the future is the increasing availability of game-making tools, such as moddable game engines. A lot of really amazing new work is being done by smaller teams who can develop incredible games at a fraction of the cost and labor. I think there is a lot more room to innovate, and most of the innovation will be done by independent artists and modders.

Thank you for your time.

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