Patricia A. Pizer

As a child, Patricia often gamed with her family; board games, card games, parlor games. When she was 12, two magical events occurred that changed the course of her life. First, she played Pong. Second, she played Colossal Cave (a.k.a. Adventure) on a mainframe at the Bank of America. The experiences sparked her passion and belief that games were a viable storytelling medium and planted the seed for her career.

Her first job was at Infocom. She'd played all their games and was a huge fan. She found out they had an opening for a Quality Assurance Software Engineer (tester). It was like a dream come true. She'd test games in production, record bugs, make design suggestions, create "online" hints, customer support, and write user manuals.

After Infocom, she became the first tester and then Manager of QA for Hodj n Podj at Boffo Games. Over time, she became more progressively involved in design and made significant contributions to The Space Bar in writing, design and scripting. After Boffo, Patricia continued her work as a designer for CogniToy, makers of MindRover, and Harmonix. She then moved to GameFX (a studio of THQ) where she established their QA department before becoming a Designer/Producer.

During this period, she discovered the challenge of Massively Multiplayer Games (MMOs) and moved on to Turbine Games where she was the Lead Designer and then Creative Director for the sequel to Asheron's Call. After a stint with MMOs for Ubisoft (URU primarily) and the Walt Disney Internet Group (Toontown Online & Pirates of the Caribbean Online), she worked with the folks at 42 Entertainment on Last Call Poker, an ARG for the release of Activision's GUN and discovered a new level of both online games and player interactions.

In 2007, she became the Sr. Online Designer for Disney Interactive Studios and was the creator of DGamer, a social network for kids to play from Nintendo DS to Internet; this application is integrated with all Disney DS titles. Finally at DIS, she was the design producer for Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force, a very popular DS title aimed at Club Penguin players. Shortly after her work on Club Penguin: Elite, Patricia was named one of the gaming industry’s top 20 women of 2008 and feature in Gamasutra’s “Women in Games: The Gamasutra 20.”

In addition to her many other achievements in the game industry, She is also is on the Founder & Advisory Committee for the Boston Area Game Developers Network (now IGDA). She is also a regular speaker at both the San Francisco Game Developer's Conference (GDC) and the Austin Game Conference (now GDC Online). She holds a place on the Board of Advisors for Project Horseshoe, a game design think tank.

After becoming the Creative Director for ZeeGee Games where she designed Club Thoroughbred (FB game), she decided to pursue a different course and founded Where's The Fun?, a firm which provides consulting and pursues projects for the improvement of games. She lives in Florida with her cockatoo. They both like to play games and while Patricia speaks both French and Spanish, her cockatoo is still trying to master English.