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" YOU HAVE A PRETTY AWESOME JOB AS A PRODUCER AT VIDEO GAME PUBLISHER EA. WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO TAKE THIS CAREER PATH? &amp;quot;It started with my always playing video games growing up, I couldn&amp;#039;t get enough of them. After high school I went to college, but I didn&amp;#039;t really know what to do once I got there. Living in Holland, there was only Media Studies to really get involved in, nothing with games. But I knew I loved games, so to pay for college I started writing game reviews and discussed people&amp;#039;s interactions with avatars and other gaming theories. A professor who was interested in teaching a class on games noticed my work and together we got a class into the University of Amsterdam&amp;#039;s curriculum.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;From there I moved to San Francisco after winning a Fulbright Scholarship to get my masters and met my future husband. Through him I met a ton of people in the industry, including Lucy Bradshaw (who is behind Spore and the Sims games) and I was truly inspired. After getting my master&amp;#039;s we moved to Montreal, where I connected with EA execs to help them study how people were connecting with the Wii. From that research, I was able to get into producing.&amp;quot; TELL US ABOUT YOUR GAME, NEED FOR SPEED NITRO. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a racing game for the Wii, and the first time Need for Speed has done something like this. We looked at how people played with the Wii and made it a very social game. It is easy to play too! I recently played against a 74-year-old grandmother on a press trip and she learned easily!&amp;quot; WHAT ARE THE STEPS YOU TAKE TO PRODUCE A VIDEO GAME? &amp;quot;Everyone has their own process but for me, I do a lot of background research first. I analyze other games and combine that with all the research I&amp;#039;ve done on the Wii. Then, I develop suggestions for the design team and from there I help other teams get a better understanding of the game. I also organize a lot of play tests with focus groups to see where people are having difficulty playing the game.&amp;quot; WHAT ARE SOME BIG MYTHS ABOUT GIRLS WORKING IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY? &amp;quot;That we can&amp;#039;t do it! There are not a lot of women in the industry, it is a boys business. Some studios will have more women than men, but that is rare. Now however, I am starting to see more and more women get their feet wet. It&amp;#039;s really great that more women are getting involved in engineering, modeling, and computer science.&amp;quot; WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR GIRL GAMERS WHO WANT A CAREER LIKE YOURS? &amp;quot;What I didn&amp;#039;t do that I wish I had was research all of the fields you can get involved in. From design, to modeling, to production, there are a lot of aspects of this business that might interest you. Recognize what your strengths are and then build on that. Be persistent and do whatever you can to keep involved, whether is writing games reviews for your school paper or whatever, just keep involved in what you love.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/life/school/advice/a27822/anouk-bachman-dec09/>