Carol Shaw — The First Female Video Game Designer
We currently live in a digital age where electronics are becoming more and more integrated into our daily lives, so it’s not really a surprise that video games are a $100 billion global industry. Video games started off in research labs but now can be found on a variety of different platforms including mobile devices, home consoles, arcade systems, and handheld consoles. We’ve gained cultural icons from games including Pong, Pac-Man, and Mario. With over 2.5 billion video gamers in the world, I can safely say that I am one of those. My love for video games and my curious nature of ‘how things work’ was just one reason as to why I chose to pursue a software developer career path. Even though I don’t design or program games, a woman who inspired me to continue my career path is one of the first (if not the first) female game designer, Carol Shaw.
Being the daughter of a mechanical engineer, Carol Shaw found herself more interested in playing with toy trains and railroads compared to dolls. In high school, she found that she enjoyed playing text-based games during her computing class. Taking that enjoyment and her excellent math skills, she pursued Electrical Engineering and Computers bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Computer Science. Following her academic career, she took a job at Atari, a well known video game company. She worked on a number of games, but her best known title is River Raid. During this time in the video game industry, one designer created the whole game. Graphics, logic, and sound on River Raid (and several others) were completed by Carol Shaw herself.
In my life and career, I feel like I can relate a lot to Carol Shaw. Although neither of my parents are engineers, I still very much enjoyed math and video games with my brother. In an interview with “Vintage Computing”, Carol stated that she pursued what came to her naturally and didn’t worry about gender barriers. Even when the President of Atari made a comment about finally having a female game designer to create cosmetic and interior design games, Carol didn’t let that bother her. I went from an all girls high school, to a primarily male dominated bachelor’s degree and career path and didn’t really think about how there weren’t any other women along side me. Carol did find that there wasn’t any discrimination among her fellow game designers. I still find this to be true. There might be less females in the developer community, but I don’t find that anyone in that community is actually trying to exclude women.
While I still very much enjoy video games, I’m perfectly happy just enjoying them and not trying to create the next best game to compete in that growing industry. While Carol Shaw only worked as a game designer, I think she helped to pave a way for women today and the future to make a name for themselves in the software developer community as a whole. Are you looking for your own place in the developer community? Come join the great team at Atomic Robot by checking out our job openings!
