The Most Influential Women in Technology 2011 - Heather Kelley
Heather Kelley
Founder and President, Perfect Plum
If you were to read Heather Kelley's profile at her website Moboid [2], you'd see she calls herself a "Game Designer with a diverse background in both casual and hardcore game development," noting her "deep interest in experimental and non-traditional game design" and expertise in "non-standard controllers." But here Kelley's only telling half the story.
The other half of the story is this: Kelley recently founded Perfect Plum [3], a startup that designs and builds the world's most creative and intuitive personal pleasure software for women. She's also a co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective [4], a group that runs the annual Gamma social gaming event; a game design researcher at the Hexagram Institute [5]; and was previously a "Game (Life) artist" in residence at the Firehouse Center for the Arts, as well as creative director at the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College. She's also worked as a designer on games like "Thief: Deadly Shadows" and "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory."
Kelley has also been involved in game-based efforts to end gender violence, and served as co-chair at the IGDA Women in Game Development Special Interest Group [6]. She's also helped build award-winning games like Lapis, which explores the female orgasm, and the iOS app "Body Heat," which is designed to drive sex toys through an interactive game-like process. She also helped create a concept game about losing one's virginity. (Talk about challenging the norms of gaming...) Kelley has been surprised herself: She once said that writing Lapis changed her preconceptions that sex-related games had to be about intercourse. —Kit Eaton [7]
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