Each year, Fast Company magazine chooses to honor a group of women working in the technology industry in various categories: Executives, Activists, Media, Entrepreneurs, Evangelists, Brainiacs, and Gamers. This year’s Gamers category has such highlights as EA Maxis’ SVP Lucy Bradshaw, Ohai’s CEO and Cofounder Susan Wu, and XEO Design Founder Nicole Lazzaro.
Bradshaw is the leader of Maxis’ 80-person development team, tasked with turning studio founder Will Wright’s dreams into retail reality. She’s responsible for shepherding The Sims and Spore. Bradshaw also noted that 65% of Sims players were female. "I want to see more women coming into this business," Bradshaw says. "I look at it as a business imperative. Companies in the video game business like Electronic Arts are going to benefit from having more women in development and in roles that bring new perspective."
Ohai Cofounder and CEO Susan Wu is focused on turning online social gaming into a mainstream and profitable venture. “We're trying to do for massively multiplayer online games what the iPhone did for smart phones and what the Wii did for consoles. We are basically building the world's first MMOs for social networks, and we just launched our first one into an open-beta, but we're building six to eight of these games per year,” said Wu in an interview with Fast Company. “I'm super-psyched to say in our alpha-test we were able to get to about 50% male, 50% female, and 70% of our most active players were women.”
Nicole Lazzaro, founder of video game design consulting firm XEODesign, is also the designer of Tilt, the first iPhone game to make use of the accelerometer. Lazzaro looks to create more engaging gaming experiences with a wide range of games. "If we were to change a feature on Twitter, or in Pacman, or Google, how could we change the emotions that players and users feel?" Lazzaro says. "Make it more viral, make it more fun, match this particular brand--all of these things are possible."
The rest of the list also includes the Institute for the Future’s Director of Games Research & Development Jane McGonigal, Funji Founder Shinyoung Park, Addicting Games’ Vice President Kate Connally, LOLapps CoFounder Annie Chang, GamingAngels Founder Trina Schwimmer, and Serious Games’ Director of Research, Sara de Freitas. The full list, with profiles, can be found here.
