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 I did a BA Honours in Tourism at Abertay University in which I really enjoyed the marketing sections we covered. As a result, I went on to do a Msc in International Marketing. While doing my Msc I focussed my dissertation on a start up spin out business from Abertay University called TPLD who had created a prototype of a multiplayer teambuilding computer game for teambuilding training. This is called Infiniteams. I was very interested in this whole concept of using games for training (this was 2002) and did my dissertation on taking new innovative products to market, and focussed on Infiniteams as a case study. After my course, I was employed by TPLD as a marketing person and worked with the company for 2 years.
I then relocated to Northern Ireland to be trained as a Marketing Consutant by Parity in which I helped a start up partner with Ryanair and create an online shop to sell reasons to travel. This site is still operating and called Activity Breaks. After my year training, I moved back to Scotland where I took up a position again with TPLD as Marketing Manager, for a year and a half. At this point, I had identified a gap in the market which could help both developers grow and get in touch with the right clients, and help potential clients understand what serious games are.
In October 2005 I moved to London to set up a business. 3 years on we have re-named and re-branded, opened an office in the West Midlands at the Serious Games Institute (while still keeping an office in London) and we are now starting to build up the team. My business is called Digital 2.0 which is a serious games consultancy and we now own the first online shop window for serious games, www.buyseriousgames.com and have prototypes being tested to identify a company’s readiness to adopt serious games, Game Ready, and a game heat map to identify where games are best placed in an organistion. As well as working with the top serious games developers in the UK – TPLD, Pixelearning, PlayGen and others, we are working with one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world helping them to reap the benefits of using games technology for training and communications.
The thing I like best about working in IT is that you can be as creative as you like or as structured as you like. It is for everyone. I like creative structure, so it suits me well. IT allows for organised thinking as well as blue sky thinking. The area is moving so fast you are constantly learning.
My career in IT was a natural progression; I never thought I would end up working with technology, but I loved games as a kid and would spend hours playing Sonic or Mario. This now allows me to apply a lot of what I learnt when I was younger and build on it to understand what we learn from games today.
The highlights of my career in terms of clients, was winning our current project with the Oil and Gas company was a real break through. We have worked with large companies but they have been from IT, telecoms and other technical based backgrounds. To win this client really proved that the non technical businesses are starting to need what we do. Talking at South by South West was amazing. Just to see my name on the speak list was a buzz. All the events we have been have been fantastic, they really open your mind to other possibilities and you make some great partnerships.
Personally, I want to be one of the people contributing to making serious games a main tool for learning, but my overall aspiration is to make Digital 2.0 a central part of the serious games community.
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