Ada and Christina

Today—March 24—is Ada Lovelace day. Last year Suw Charman-Anderson wrote in her blog:

I’ve mainly stayed away from the discussion of gender issues in technology. I didn’t think that I had any real expertise to share. But over the last six months, after many conversations, it has become clear that many of my female friends in tech really do feel disempowered. They feel invisible, lacking in confidence, and unsure how to compete for attention with the men around them.

Thus, she pledged to write about a woman in technology she admired, but only if 1000 other people would do the same. Over 3500 people responded to the pledge last year.

Now it’s the second annual Ada Lovelace day. I only learned about it today, but I am compelled to write. I’m always annoyed when I see or find out about women in science and technology being slighted. It seems as often as every week I hear a story about girls being discouraged in science and math education, or women struggling in a technology industry still largely powered by testosterone. It baffles me, as a child of the 1970’s, that women are still treated as second class citizens, regardless of their achievements. Why is there still no Equal Rights Amendment in the US Constitution?

But those issues are much larger than me. Ada Lovelace day provides as good an opportunity as any to take a small step in the right direction and recognize an outstanding achievement.

The woman in technology who has had the biggest impact on my life recently is Christina Norman, a lead gameplay designer for Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. I’ve never met her. I only know her from her online interviews (video and print), her twitter feed, Mass Effect developer blog posts on enemies and equipment in Mass Effect 2, and her amazing GDC presentation “Where Did My Inventory Go?”

Mostly, I know her from her work. Her mobygames c.v. includes the movie tie-in Aeon Flux for Playstation 2 and Xbox, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Rock Band, Dragon Age: Origins, as well as DLC add-ons for Mass Effect 1 and 2. I don’t know anything about the Playstation game, but the rest are uniformly outstanding. Teams that create games like those don’t typically carry dead weight. It takes an amazing team to create an amazing game, so it’s telling that Christina Norman worked on so many amazing games.

For Mass Effect 2, she took the combat mechanics from the hugely popular Mass Effect, and like the game design equivalent of a surgeon, cut out all the stuff that was even marginally boring or frustrating. Her team replaced it with a potent mix of third-person shooter cover-based gunplay, health and shield recharging over time to keep things moving, and a variety of fun powers and abilities with a shared cooldown so the player can actually take advantage of the variety. If none of that means anything to you, just know this: Mass Effect 2, in which combat is only part of the game, provides combat as exciting as any game dedicated solely to combat. In fact, it’s better than most of them.

Refinements like that don’t happen by accident. Her GDC presentation includes a massive spreadsheet with a quantitative analysis of positive and negative review comments on different gameplay elements. Her team spent two years brainstorming, testing and refining a mostly new gameplay experience for Mass Effect 2. Most game sequels are easy money, relying on the same engine, the same gameplay mechanics, only changing the story and visual elements. Mass Effect 2 is completely the other way around. It continues the story, and it lives in the same galaxy as the original, but the gameplay, engine and environments are fresh and original.

Having led technical teams myself in the past, I know what a challenge it can be to maintain focus during a project this long. I also know that inertia is a powerful force in software design. It takes a brave, creative and talented person to lead a team into the unknown, and come through the other side with something so much better than you started with. It’s a real accomplishment to end up with something that works so well that you’re amazed it didn’t work that way all along.

So, on Ada Lovelace day, my hat’s off to Christina Norman. She has been instrumental in crafting gameplay that has captured so many hours of my life, and keeps me wanting to go back for more.