On Thursday, April 11th, Azure Bowie, a Producer from the Sims, talked to us about her experience in the game industry. She was a Product Manager on the Sims’ marketing team for a few years before moving over to a production role on the Sims Store. Currently, Azure is working as a producer on an unannounced Sims project.

Azure Bowie

During  her 4+1 MBA program, Azure had trouble in finding a summer internship in the business industry. Her career counselor suggested that she choose something more in line with her personal interests, so she wrote a passionate letter to the company that makes her favorite game– the Sims. Her business education helped her begin her career at EA in the Sims marketing department.

Azure began her talk by introducing her background and how she switched gears from marketing to prodcution. During her time in the marketing team it became clear to her colleagues that she had a strong production skill set. She spent some time doing research and getting advice from other people here at EA, and when the right position opened up just over a year later she was moved into a production role. Rather than taking the first possible production role available, she waited until she found an opening that was a good fit for someone with a business education – working with the Sims Store.

Azure’s talk underscored the  importance of networking and establishing connections with industry professionals. These connections make it much more likely that  people will seek you out  when the right opportunity opens up.

The talk was mostly Q&A based. Azure shared a lot of honest opinions and useful information. The key take-aways from her talk are listed below.

- Producer’s work is to unblock things.
- Prepare some padding room in planning, so you would always end at a good place.
- Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
- Understanding how people work and catching up with them is important, but micro-managing never help.
- Communications with different teams can be different, if the method makes work flow more efficient.
- Listen to people, understand why, and be the communication bridge.
- Be well-organized

Last Thursday we had Vibhu Mittal the founder of Root-1 visit to give us a talk on educational games. Root-1 (http://www.root-1.com/) is a company that predominantly makes language learning educational games for children aged from 8 years to 14 years. The currently have four games, X-Words, Word Kung Fu, Word Joust and StoryLines.

Vibhu Mittal speaking to the class

Root-1 is a startup based in Mountain View, CA and was founded by ex-Google employees. They founded Root-1 mainly because they wanted to impact the world in some way and they felt making educational games is one of the best ways to do that. Vibhu Mittal spoke to us about the Edutainment as a viable market. He also compared it to the parent markets i.e. Gaming and Education. It was very clear that the team at Root-1 know what they are getting into. They have done a lot of market research and have a set goal for the company.

One of the main topics of discussion during the talk was comparing this newest type of educational media to traditional teaching methods. Vibhu Mittal believes that the traditional educational methods can’t be replaced in the near future and Root-1 is in no way trying to replace them. Root-1 is trying to be a subordinate to the traditional teaching methods. This is to drive engagement amongst youngsters towards the educational content.

I was thoroughly impressed with this kind of detailed planning by Root-1. Unlike many other startups that don’t have a concrete plan of action, Root-1 seems to be well on their way to success. Within no time they have viable games with great art and simple yet elegant game mechanics which stick to the purpose of the company. I really enjoyed the talk by Vibhu Mittal and I am sure to be on the lookout for future Root-1 games.