Kellee Santiago, president and co-founder of thatgamecompany, has found success by exploring gaming's gentler side.
With titles such as “Flower,” “Flow” and “Cloud,” Kellee Santiago, president and co-founder of thatgamecompany, has discovered success in gaming’s gentle side.
These kind gaming experiences differ from most on the market and are meant to evoke emotion, innovation and creativity.
While Santiago does not see danger in letting children access many of the market’s more violent games, the 30-year-old developer does think there needs to be recognition of the violence. Her games, on the other hand, create a completely different experience. "Flower," for example, allows a player to blow breezes, gather flower petals and appreciate a colorful landscape, which Santiago refers to as a "video game version of a poem."
Santiago graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, hosting a background in the performing arts. Before becoming a video game developer, Santiago gained experience integrating digital and interactive media with live performance. While completing her master's in fine arts at the Interactive Media program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, Santiago realized her passion for video game creation.
"That attraction I had to working on original theater works was very similar," Santiago explained. "I had grown up with video games; I was definitely a gamer all my life, and I had just never thought about it as a creative medium....As soon as I did, it was just really exciting, because I saw this huge, untapped potential and a lot of things that hadn't been done before. That excited me."
During her time at USC, Santiago worked on a student project named "Cloud." After only a few months of its online release, 350,000 people had played the downloadable PC game; Santiago’s company ended up releasing the game, which was also very exciting for her.
"In comparison to every single play I probably ever worked on in combination never saw that large an audience," she said .
Santiago, whose first memories of playing video games include an arcade version of “Super Mario Bros," launched thatgamecompany with fellow USC graduate, Jenova Chen. The independent company has received several positive product reviews since and was even honored in 2008 as one of Gamasutra’s "20 Breakthrough Developers" of the year.
So far, two of the small company’s games have been released on the Sony PlayStation 3 platform. When people play her games, Santiago wants them to take away the feeling of having a relationship with them.
"One of the questions we always get is, are we always going to make emotional games," Santiago said. "We are saying all games are emotional."
In an industry mainly comprised of men, Santiago feels as though she has always received equal treatment. As far as designing a product that hosts a main demographic of young men, according to Santiago, this is not the sole audience: “The average gamer now is 35 years old. Because the audiences are maturing and simultaneously we have a generation of people who've grown up with games who are entering the industry, it's sort of now our turn to create," she explained.
Scott Steinberg, publisher for Digitaltrends.com and author of "Get Rich Playing Games," refers to Santiago as one of several women making a splash in the gaming world. He gives credit to her quality of work and great designing capabilities for her achievements of such visibility and says her games stand out because they "offer something so different."
"They are unique, something audiences haven't seen before. A lot of them actually border on being virtual art experiences more so than video games," Santiago said. “These are games that push boundaries that appeal to folks of all ages, interests and genders."
"The nice part about it is, they can be consumed at a very leisurely pace; they can be consumed in bite-sized sessions," Steinberg added. "These are the types of titles that we need as an industry to help broaden our horizons."
"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" -- Homer Simpson
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