Draft:Kimberly Swift

Summary

Kimberly Swift is an American video game designer born in 1983. She is known for her success in creating games like Portal and Left 4 Dead when she worked with Valve. Following her success in creating games, she has won many awards, and recognitions, and had the experience working with publishers Square Enix on PC, Xbox Live Arcade, and PlayStation Network.

Before Career

Kimberly Swift’s career started when she attended DigPen Institute of Technology. She and her classmates were working on a school project that led to the development of Narbacular Drop in 2005. Coincidentally, she met a representative of Valve who recognized her game at an exposition leading to extending an invitation for her to demonstrate the game to Valve Corporation. Once she demonstrated the game, Gabe Newell, the president of Valve Corporation, instantly offered her to work for his company as a game designer. Accepting the position, she recreated her game using the Source engine which is now known as Portal in 2007.

Career

Once the release of Portal, she gained instant recognition and awards for the game by winning Game Developers Choice Awards and Game of the Year. She continued her success at Valve with contribution to the game series Left 4 Dead which was released in 2008-2009 (Nutt, 2012).

After the release of the Left 4 Dead series, she left Valve Corporation to join Airtight Games. She gained new experience in working for a corporation and a studio that has to work with a publisher to release the game instead of publishing its own games. While working for Airtight Games, she contributed to creating Quantum Conundrum which was released in 2012 (Takahashi, 2012).

Her recognition continuously grew to the point she was hired by Amazon in 2014 to develop games. Then, after working with Amazon for a few years, in 2017, Electronic Arts also known as EA hired Swift as a design director for the Motive Studios. While working with EA, she has contributed to developing Star Wars Battlefront II (Mckeand, 2017).

After working with EA, she was a game design director, and as a senior director worked for Stadia Games & Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios (Mckeand, 2017).

Swift’s Goals

In her interview after the release of Quantum Conundrum, she revealed what her motive was behind creating and developing video games. Swift pointed out that the main attraction point of her games is the manipulative aspect of the game. She believed that the players should be challenged enough to think that they are solving the problems introduced in the game by themselves when it's actually all planned and led by game developers like her. To find the right balance between the difficulty of the game and the players’ ability to complete the games, she constantly runs tests to if the game is completable for her and her colleagues. She also structured her team so that every worker has a voice of their own and their inputs matter no matter what since it will always be tested before being finalized in the game. Therefore, the structure of how she develops her game with her team is very customer-centered, where she wants her players to have the best experience playing her video games (Nutt, 2012).

In addition to her intended structure in the working environment to develop games, she also wanted to revitalize the idea of imagination. She recognized that video games are limited to who is intended to play. Specifically, there are games that are meant for kids which are more cartoon-ish, and games that are meant for adults which aren’t really inappropriate for kids (Rigney, 2012). The division is caused by the fact that imagination is no longer playing a factor in video games. Swift treats video games like toys where toys are being played with not because they are fun to play with, but rather because they allow people to be imaginative. By translating imagination into the fantasy of video games, she believed she could truly bring imaginative thinking to the players including adults (Nutt, 2012).

Swift’s impact

Based on Swift’s achievements, among many games, she was remembered as a contributor and developer of Portal which was the first-person puzzle platform game, and Left 4 Dead which was Valve Corporation’s best seller (Tambini, 2018). While her games are still being played, those games have started to lose their popularity, as players’ interests and demands change over time. Despite the change in interest, with Swift’s method of creating games that are customer-centered, she is determined to design games that will entertain players.

Even with her success in the gaming industry, her being a woman is another factor that hinders her success. Specifically, Gamergate is a harassment campaign that targets women in the video game industry where female video game designers like Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn are experiencing sexist abuse. Therefore, reforming the gaming industry to create a supportive environment for women, transgenders, and non-gender binary professionals will help recognize their success (Tambini, 2018).