A 25 year veteran of the video game industry, Brenda Brathwaite is a contract game designer and professor of game development and interactive design at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. A "game designer" is a person who designs Video games or one who designs traditional games such as Board games Video Games Designer A video game designer The Savannah College of Art and Design ( SCAD) is a private college with campuses located in Savannah and Atlanta, GA She has worked on 22 internationally known titles, including Def Jam: Icon, Playboy: The Mansion, Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes, the award-winning Wizardry series and the award-winning Jagged Alliance series of video games. Def Jam Icon is a Fighting game, and is the third in Electronic Arts 's Def Jam -licensed hip hop Video game series Playboy The Mansion is a business simulation Video game for the PlayStation 2, PC and Xbox consoles developed by Dungeons and Dragons Heroes is a Hack and slash Video game with RPG elements Wizardry is a series of Computer role-playing games developed by Sir-Tech, that were popular in the 1980s Jagged Alliance is a series of Turn-based tactics Computer games for the PC.
According to a Next Generation magazine article[1] written by Ernest Adams, Brathwaite is the longest, continuously serving woman in video game development today.
Brenda began her career in 1981 at game maker Sir-tech Software, Inc. working on the Wizardry series of role-playing games first as a tester and later moving up through the design and content creation ranks to lead designer on the award-winning series. She was employed with Sir-tech for 18 years before moving on to game maker Atari.
In 2005, Brathwaite founded the International Game Developers Sex Special Interest group and has extensively studied adult content in video games. Since working on Playboy, she has studied sexual content in video games and is regularly interviewed about the subject in the media. She has written a book on the subject, Sex in Video Games. Sex in Video Games is a Nonfiction Book by Brenda Brathwaite about the history of Human sexual behavior in Computer and video
In 2006, Brathwaite was named one of the 100 most influential women in the game industry by Next Generation magazine and her peers, and Nerve magazine cited her as a “New Radical” - one of “the 50 artists, actors, authors, activists and icons who are making the world a more stimulating place”. In the spring of 2007, she was awarded the Presidential Fellowship at Savannah College of Art and Design to develop an exhibit and presentation titled, “What You Don’t Know About Video Games…”. The project is slated for a Fall 2007 debut.
Brathwaite is an active member of the International Game Developers Association and a passionate anti-censorship advocate and a proponent of parental rating awareness. She is a regular speaker at universities and conferences, most recently the Idea City Conference 2007, Game Developers Conference 2007, Montreal Games Summit 2006, Game Developers Conference 2006, Future Play 2005, Game Developers Conference 2005, and the Women in Games Conference (a part of the Austin Games Conference) 2005. She has lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University and Clarkson University.
Brenda was born in Ogdensburg, New York and is a graduate of Clarkson University.
Sources
- Brenda's Game Design Blog
- MTV Interview with Brenda
- Brenda's IGDA Sex SIG Blog
- Gamasutra Book Review
- Gamasutra Interview with Brenda
- Stratos Group Interview
- Next Generation Article
External links
Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic