Erin Robinson

Personal life and education

Erin Robinson is originally from Toronto. The first game she ever purchased was The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain (1994). She earned money for the game by doing household chores as a child, and claims "Maybe associating video games with chores was the reason I became a developer" She also played Myst and King's Quest VII. Robinson has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Her college thesis was on how experiences you have can be translated in memories and how those memories can be made stronger. She worked as a research assistant at a psychology lab. Unhappy with her work, she eventually quit to become a te. She has been inspired by the work of [Marjane Satrapi], particularly her graphic novel [Persepolis]. She lives in Chicago, Illinois. . She is firm supporter of the fight against climate change, and has called for video game companies to divest their investments in fossil fuel companies.

Work

Robinson works from home as an independent video game developer under her own indie game label "Ivy Games". She started in 2005. The first game she ever designed, Spooks, was about a dead girl who tries to save a goldfish. The game was designed on MS Paint. When she first started designing video games she kept it a secret from her friends because she thought it was "super geeky." She develops the concept, mechanics, and artwork, but she hires computer programmers to code the game logic. Many of her games have a retro design feel. Her early games were released as freeware. These freeware games included Spooks, Little Girl in Underland, Nanobots, She has released two independently funded games: [Puzzle Bots] (a point and click puzzle adventure game) and [Gravity Ghost] (a game about a ghost girl on a mission to save the galaxy). In the game Gravity Ghost she experimented with alternative forms of game story-telling, which allows the player to learn how to navigate the fictional world as the same rate as the character. She has stressed the importance of the introspective journey to this particular game. She has done artwork for Blackwell Unbound.

Robinson has taught indie gaming classes at Columbia College Chicago. She was named one of the most influential women in technology, in 2011, by Fast Company. She has spoken at Game Developers Conference about video games being used in neuroscience as rehabilitative therapy. She talked about her findings that video games are increasingly being used in medical and rehabilitative therapy and that playing First-Person Shooters improves visual and auditory perception. In 2015, she was named the creative director of the master's degree program in games and playable media at the [Silicon Valley Center] of [the University of California], Santa Cruz.