One of the world's leading game designers lives in Galway and is course director of the MSc in Game Design and Development at the University of Limerick. She first started making games, she says, probably in 1972, (when she was 6 years old) and she's still going. Her name is Brenda Romero and she spoke to Ryan on Tuesday, about all things gaming-related, from the fun, fun, fun, to the very, very serious.
"Sometimes people will ask how I became a game designer and the answer is, I don't know when I wasn't one."
As a child, Brenda would buy used board games at garage sales, take the parts and make her own games. She got so used to doing this, that the first time someone gave her a new board game as a present, she excitedly opened it up, flipped the board over and started making her own game from the pieces. This was before the computer game industry began its relentless march to world domination, but it signalled where Brenda's future might lie.
"So my first ever job was, I played games, I memorised them, and when people called up asking how to get to the wizard on the tenth level, I knew that answer."
The first computer game that really got Brenda's attention was Sid Meier's Civilisation, a world-building strategy game that was published in the early 1990s. Brenda was fascinated by it and wanted to know what was going on inside the game and how the game was producing what she was watching on the screen. She was, she says, "like a kid who wanted to take something apart to find out how it's working".
"In that single instant, if there could be a moment where I crossed from one side to the other… the deep fascination really started there."
The first big game that Brenda worked on as part of a design team was Wizardry 8, an award-winning role-playing video game series. The eighth chapter was to be the culmination of a trilogy and the final game release in the series. Fan expectation was high.
"There was really maybe one way for it to go right and two thousand ways for it to go wrong, if not more."
In 2009, Brenda arrived in Silicon Valley, the Hollywood of video game designers. She went from taking two, three, or even four years to make a game, to pushing things out on a daily basis. She described her time there as "unbelievably dynamic".
"When we were in Silicon Valley, it was all about, what's your exit, what's your plan. And I didn't want an exit from making games. I wasn't looking for a big cash out, I was just looking to make something I was proud of."
Brenda made several analogies with the movie industry, including one highlighting the way games and gamers are perceived: if people say they watch movies, people don't reply by saying, "oh movies are for kids". But if someone says they like to play games, the reply will almost inevitably be, "games are for kids". She also gave Ryan an idea of what the gaming industry is worth:
"If you add film, radio and TV together, games makes more money."
Surprisingly, the common perception of gamers is inaccurate: the average gamer is not a 17-year-old boy in his parents' basement, but actually a 43-year-old woman. Games don't always have to be fun either, Brenda told Ryan. Serious subjects can be tackled through games and she illustrated this by describing how she assembled a game on the fly for her 7-year-old daughter to illustrate the reality behind the Middle Passage, a stage of the slave trade from Africa to the New World. It's an extraordinary two-minute tale which you can hear on the link above.