From the Appalachian Mountains to Adelaide, Lauren Woolbright has enjoyed a career that stretches from park ranger to game designer. We ask her about the importance of different approaches to game design, and how she mixes her love of the outdoors with gaming.

What is your role and what does your work focus on?

I’m a Lecturer of Digital Media, and I teach and research game design or, more generally, interaction design. We all use digital interfaces every day, but they are so common that we hardly notice them; self-checkouts at the grocery store, ATMs, apps on our phones – these are all interfaces that someone designed. If they work smoothly, they become embedded in our daily lives. Another type of interaction design, and something way more interesting to me, involves the immersive worlds we can build in games, museums, or in virtual reality. I’m interested in how the digital worlds we inhabit can be designed to communicate with us emotionally, how spaces tell stories, and how this impacts us as human beings striving to understand each other.

What journey brought you to this point in your career?

I grew up in the southern Appalachian Mountains of North and South Carolina, and my love for being outdoors is part of my core. I always wanted to study literature; I was a voracious reader, and I majored in English as an undergrad, also working at the local planetarium running physics demos and Lego building challenges for school groups. This is where I first discovered my love of teaching, while working on my first interactive exhibit, which was about nanotechnology. I loved the design challenge of communicating something so abstract in a way that would engage kids.

After graduating, I worked as a park ranger in the South Carolina mountains for two years before heading back to school for my Masters in English. I did my PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design, which gave me a lot of flexibility in composing my dissertation.

During that period (in 2013), women were starting to speak out about how female bodies are represented in games, and then GamerGate happened. Women game developers, game journalists, scholars and players started being targeted by an online mob of angry men, and many women left the games industry. I felt that it was important not to just critique what was happening from the sidelines, but to contribute something that demonstrated another way of approaching game design – a feminist way.

I decided to make a game, but I wasn’t sure what about until one day I was teaching this Victorian vampire novel called The Blood of the Vampire. The female protagonist is a passing-for-white heiress who is a psychic vampire, but doesn’t know it, so she keeps accidentally killing people. The novel ends with her suicide, but she is blameless and such a strong woman, that I felt it couldn’t be her end. The game I made begins just after her death. Players take the role of her spirit, and as she explores the London neighbourhood where she died, she starts to learn more about her vampiric powers and how to use them. Based on what a player chooses to do, the game offers six different endings.

I study and design games now, but my parents were wary of digital games, so I didn’t get to play many growing up. I didn’t become a gamer until after college. I started out playing tabletop role-playing games like World of Darkness, Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons. My love of storytelling transferred easily into playspaces, and it wasn’t long before I was running games for my friends and starting to dabble with playing digital games, too. I mostly enjoy indie titles that bring something new or quirky to the table, but I play major titles as well. Horizon Zero Dawn and Night in the Woods are my favourites.

I’m fascinated by how meaning gets communicated, or gets lost, or emerges in unexpected ways when audiences participate in co-creation of the story in a game. A game’s story is partly its cutscenes and dialogue choices, but it is also how you choose to play it, including all the weird and wacky things you can do, whether the designers intended it or not.

What do you love most about your work?

I love collaborating with others to make something incredible. Rarely does anyone design in a vacuum, and I think we benefit greatly from having many perspectives at the table. What we choose to make as designers reflects our values and has everything to do with our lived experiences, so we have to make sure we include perspectives that are not our own. It’s boring to keep telling the same stories over and over again, and it dangerously misrepresents the variety of people and ideas in the world.

What should people know about your role?

Students who undertake interaction design, making games, and creating digital art across the programs in BCA are incredibly talented, so I’m especially excited to work with them and my colleagues in VEED. I also want to collaborate with people in other disciplines. Games benefit greatly from expertise from a wide range of fields such as psychology, anthropology, environmental sciences, history, philosophy, literature, and music. So, if you have a cool idea that would make a great game, I’d love to work with you.

What is something you are most proud of?

I’m proud to have made it this far in my career and somehow managed to have three kids – possible in no small part due to my amazing stay-at-home husband. I’m also proud of us for making the huge leap to move here from the other side of the world. We always wanted to live abroad and travel, and now we are! We are already planning trips around South Australia and to New Zealand and Japan.

What does a normal day look like for you?

If my 20-month-old daughter wakes up early, I sit with her and play Minecraft with my husband before taking the bigger kids to school, then head to campus to teach or do some research. I’ve been trying to spend time in The Void at Flinders, so I can get to know the tech in there, and I’m working on my Unreal Engine 5, Blender, and Photoshop skills so I can start making cool things.

I’m putting final edits on a book chapter about monstrous female characters in the two most recent Resident Evil games and also working on an edited collection of essays about Critical Role. I run a journal called OneShot that publishes scholarly games and critical essays about them.

When I get home, I play with my kids. Bluey always seems to be on. I watch media analysis and philosophy content on YouTube while I cook dinner and then unwind with my husband by binge watching Netflix. We’ve been rewatching Brooklyn 9-9 lately. Fridays are family movie nights. We’ve recently watched Pacific Rim, Die Hard, and Nimona together.

How do you spend your spare time?

I’m currently playing Minecraft and Stardew Valley with my kids and Cult of the Lamb for myself, but I also like non-digital, nerdy things. We hike and go to the beach a lot. My husband and I do Medieval reenactment with the SCA. I make belts and trim using techniques and materials from Baltic regions in the Viking Age. We are also in the Mandalorian Mercs Costume Club, although we had to leave our armour behind in the US. I’m sure we’ll make something new soon.