My first knitting steps were taken back when I was 12. I was obsessed with doing unusual, old-timey things like sewing, baking cookies and knitting. No one else I knew could knit. Therefore, I would learn how to knit and amaze people.

I made a pencil case, then put aside my needles for many years.

A couple of years ago, I took up knitting again.  My friend Steph is lead designer on one of her company’s projects. She had mentioned how much fun she was having knitting, showing off a beautiful pink scarf she was making. I thought to myself, “Gee…I know how to knit. I could do that, too.”

So I took up knitting once more, stopping only during the summer.  It gets pretty darn hot in San Diego, and who wants to sit around with a bunch of yarn in one’s lap then? But come winter, I would look at patterns and start anew.

Now that I’m back in Seattle, I’ve been knitting all the time. The weather is more conducive to it. I bring my projects to our team meetings and sit in a corner someplace out of the way. When we have board game nights, I bring along the knitting.

I’m not the only gamer who knits. As a member of Women in Games International, I’ve learned that a number of its members also knit. Very awesome! It seems that many of us find it a relaxing activity that engages our minds and hands, while in the mystical recesses I mentioned the other day, the brain chugs along to figure out a program or quest.

Last year, Steph and I sat through a couple of GDC sessions together, knitting. I lured Niami, EQII Trader’s famous Den Mother, into bringing her knitting needles to our Fan Faire (where, alas, we did not get an opportunity to sit together and actually knit…although folks did catch me knitting wherever I happened to be).

And come to find out, two of the guys in my current office knit! Two that I know of, anyway! One is a level designer with whom I share an office. His brain is wired such that he looks at a pattern and figures out how to do it without anyone teaching him. The other is our lead character artist, who’s already produced a few cool hats. Apparently, he can also deconstruct completed objects and figure out how to create them on his own.

I do wish I had that sort of brain. It must be the technical bits (which I’m missing) that enables them to see how something goes together without looking at a pattern. Me, I need to slavishly follow instructions to get things made. I can’t imagine how things will look if I change them, so I work my way steadily through a project, one row at a time, one stitch followed dutifully by the next.

I enjoy knitting as much as the more creative types do, though. And that’s the important part to me.

I love little casual games. Word games, screen-clearing games, jigsaw puzzle games … they’re all interesting to me and I enjoy spending some time with all the variations.

Why? You’ll find studies and debates about their appeal elsewhere. For me, it’s simple: they’re a break from my normal routine. When you write all day long, you need to do other things to keep the rest of your brain from sleeping. The visual appeal of a game goes a long way to waking up my other senses and getting me past that most terrible of afflictions, the writer’s block.

Usually, I find myself working a casual game in several states of consciousness (how very scientific of me). There’s the forefront, where I’m actively looking to follow the game’s mechanics. There’s another layer that’s racing ahead, already picking out combinations instinctively, even if I’ve never played a particular game before. And there’s the layer that’s continuing to write whatever needs to get done, playing around with different scenarios and outcomes, oblivious to what the rest of my mind is doing.

It’s sort of the same thing as when you drive a familiar road. Some days, you’ll be miles along it before you suddenly realize you have no memory of any of the trip before you reached that point, as though you’ve woken up from a reverie that has nothing to do with where you are.

At least… I hope other people have that sensation! Otherwise, I may need a trip to a doctor to figure out why I can’t remember the journey!

This is how memory works … your brain is constantly turning over new ideas and concepts, doing things automatically and still allowing for other processes to go on without you having to direct them. Sometimes there’s a disconnect and important information disappears the moment we hear it. Or we remember minutiae that later pops up during Trivial Pursuit years later, even though we don’t know that we learned it.

To me, that’s so fascinating, that all this stuff is going on in our heads, all the time, and we don’t even need to pay attention to it. It just happens.

Back to my little fictional piece for our PR department now … which has been writing itself in the back of my brain this whole time I’ve been writing this blog entry. Mysterious!

When I first signed on to our internal task force, it seemed a pretty nebulous concept about women in gaming and I was very curious about how it would work and what we would do.

Our initial meeting dealt with some of the simpler things in life: what would we call ourselves? After all, names are things of power, both hidden and revealed. After several different suggestions, the one we all unanimously fell in love with was made by Kelly Conway, our Director of Legal and Business Affairs: Gamers In Real Life.

Suddenly, it all began to take shape. Our unveiling of a $10,000 scholarship for female students at The Art Institutes this week at the Game Developers Conference was an event with which I’m very proud to be associated. You can learn more about the scholarship at our G.I.R.L. webpage!

I love going to GDC. It’s one of those industry events that brings together people from all types of gaming careers…producers, programmers, artists, designers and students. Whenever I’m there, I feel as though it’s a reunion of sorts. There’s always a surprise hug from someone I’ve met years ago and run into by chance.

For example, at our reception event on Tuesday night, I got to hug AutumnKiss and Tovin! They’re really wonderful women who work on the fansite/newsy side of gaming and I hadn’t seen either of them in quite a long time. We didn’t really get too much time to catch up with one another, but the beauty of GDC is that you never feel disconnected from people. Even the ones you only see once in a blue moon are old friends with whom you feel you can pick up straight away as though no time has elapsed since you last met.

It pays to be on several game-related listservs, that’s for sure. Folks discuss various aspects of games: working in them, getting jobs, who’s going to which conference and what’s the latest interesting game release or beta announcement.

Yessiree, Bob! There were quite a number of giddy, gleeful posts about a certain kitty’s MMORPG beta sign ups on one of the listservs today. I’m not even in their demographic and I’m excited!

That is something that I really like about working in this industry. Folks are genuinely interested in what’s being developed by other companies, usually with an eye toward playing something new by someone else. Sure, there’s always professional curiosity about how the other guy is doing something, but usually it’s more along the lines of, “That’s cool; I can’t wait to play it.”

I’ve never seen such enthusiasm for someone else’s project on a listserv about managed health care or construction litigation (two areas in which I’ve previously worked).

“My goodness, do you see what Dewey, Cheatham and Howe is doing with their motions to compel? Amazing!”

“I’m totally signing up to get Defense Exhibit A as my desktop wallpaper!”

Nope…it’ll never happen.

At least, not the way it does with games.

Last week marked the end of my very first complete scrum cycle with The Agency. What an eye opener!

Scrum is one of those terms that gets all sorts of buzz. I’ve never worked on a scrum team before, although now that the cycle is over, I can see that it’s really just a new name for an old dog…albeit a dog with a very short leash!

Once upon a time, I worked as a product manager for an online game, working off-site with a team of likewise offsite contractors. We met once a week to go over what our long-term goals were, what our short-term goals were, how much we’d gotten done and what was left to do. Which, when it comes right down to it, is kind of scrummy, without the terminology.

Having lived through my first honest-to-gosh cycle, I must admit that I rather like scrum. Maybe it’s just because it harkens me back to Ye Olde Dayes in my gaming lifetime. Maybe it’s that I love hearing what my coworkers are doing in our team as our tasks are so completely different. Maybe it’s that I love sticky notes (my desk is often papered with sticky notes…including little notes from Calthine and RadarX when they did a tour of our San Diego office) and we use them to march our tasks across the progress charts.

It is probably all about the sticky notes. Life often comes down to its simplest pleasures.

On the bright side, a writer’s block that had been sitting squarely on my brain for most of the cycle broke apart before our cycle ended. That’s a good thing, as being creative on a strict schedule is rather stressful enough. It’s also a good thing that we are in the digital age, as I would have been a specter with tangled hair and frantic eyes, surrounded by heaps of crumpled paper.

Now, I’m just surrounded by sticky notes and that’s fine by me.

Tracy A. Seamster
Game Designer, The Agency

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Tracy Seamster (aka Owlchick) and I’ve been a game designer for SOE since 2004.

Every day that goes by, I’m grateful for the opportunity to work on games my kids have actually heard of. Prior to my work with SOE, when I worked on text-based RPGs, they were constantly asking me, “What’s the name of that game again?”

At SOE, I worked primarily on EverQuest II, a game to which I am still quite attached (just ask their producers how many times I pester them about stuff I wish I’d fixed before I left). I also spent time working with the Free Realms team to build up that world’s history and lore. Late last year, I moved back to my hometown of Seattle to join The Agency’s team as a writer.

There’s nothing more beautiful than the Pacific Northwest. Snow-capped mountains fringing deep blue waters in the lakes and the Sound…bright blue skies on crisp, clear days…gun-metal grey clouds at other times…the scent of the firs and pines (to which I am allergic, but that’s another story). It’s a wonderful place to live!

The Agency is completely different from every other game I’ve worked on in that it’s set in a modern era. I’ve done Ancient Greece as well as various medieval fantasies, but modern is completely new to me. It’s refreshingly different. There are few jobs where I actually can use some of my old Army National Guard skills to good effect.

Last year at GDC, I was on a panel that discussed breaking into the gaming industry. My contribution was that every job gives you something that you can take with you on your way to the next until you have enough life experiences to make that move. Until now, however, no one cared that I had been able to break down an M-16 in under two minutes or had a sharpshooter badge or could throw a grenade. I am hoping, however, that no one is going to make me do any of those things again anytime soon as that was a long time ago, in what seems like another lifetime.

That’s my history. A brief introduction to one of your friendly, neighborhood designers who hopes to continue making blog posts for some time to come.

Tracy