Heather Kelley/Perfect Plum – Experimental Game Design

Heather Kelley/ Perfect Plum

Heather Kelley is someone I would classify as an artist working with games (as opposed to a game designer working at the cutting edge or something. She’s blurry, and that’s why I like her, though I think she would disagree.) Right now she’s working on using smell, and other under used senses as alternative interfaces in games as well as VR. Her work revolves around issues of feminism, sex, social behaviors, and innovative play.

Heather Kelley is from Austin, Texas. Though she’d had an on-again-off-again relationship with computer games all her life, Heather Kelley got into the games industry with the company Girl Games in 1995. She was hired to do research for the game after the company’s found showed Kelley’s resume to her mom. She had done research for “the female gaming market” since 1993, for friends making games at Georgia Tech. At Girl Games, Kelley ended up transitioning from a research position to a production position on the project “Let’s Talk About Me” a program in which girls made their own games. She worked there until 1998 (in one interview she claims to have began in games in 1997), then moved on to design/production roles at Human Code, Sapient, and Ion Storm studios until she took a game design job at Ubisoft. At Ubisoft she worked on AAA titles like Star Wars: Lethal Alliance and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. In 2008 she became a visiting professor at CMU’s ETC. From this point her involvement with the AAA industry drops off, and instead she works with more game art crossover spaces, experimental games and tech, and “games that change the world.” In a 2009 talk, she expresses this as wanting “an opportunity to make a game that changes behavior.” She has also claimed this switch was because she wanted to make things that “wouldn’t have come into existence until I did them.” So she made her own business: Perfect Plum, by “bugging” her lawyer/business friends from college. Her alternative/experimental game involvement can be traced back to 2005, when she started experimental game collective Kokoromi, and her own art game practice which deal with sex. Kokoromi produced a series of massive art, music, game, and new media party events under the name Gamma, which were groundbreaking as a legitimate platform of curation for games. Currently Heather Kelley works at the ETC as a visiting professor.