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Coded Written and Directed by Kirsten Brandt

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Coded Written and Directed by Kirsten Brandt Next on our stagE THE LITTLE FOXES OUR TBA MUSICAL! WAITING FOR NEXT MAY 14-JUNE 14 JULY 16-AUGUST 23 SEPTEMBER 24-OCTOBER 25 HIGHLIGHTS A companion guide to Coded written and directed by Kirsten Brandt supported by Visionary Producers Nancy B. Coleman & Paul M. Resch March 12- April 11, 2020 Synopsis Jerrie was on her way to being a leader in the gaming industry, until a competitor armed with a legion of internet trolls launched an all-out assault on her, and she was forced into hiding. Now, she’s back with a hand-picked team and a plan to revolutionize virtual-reality gaming. If she can keep the trolls at bay and control over her staff, she might be able to dismantle the industry’s boys’ club. But when the virtual world begins to invade the real one, things get more surreal than she could have imagined. Characters Coded is set in the not-too-distant future in Silicon Valley. Here’s how playwright Kirsten Brandt describes the cast. Some actors also briefly play other characters as the story evolves. Jerrie (Stephanie Whigham): Late 30s-early 40s. Founder of the gaming company ERDA, Creative director of The Room, which offers users the ability to program it to create any scenario, or to play one of ERDA’s games. Ronnie (Chioma Agu): Mid-late 30s. Concept artist, an experienced art director and mother of three kids under 10. Chris (Anne Younan): Late 40s, early 50s. Developer and tech lead of The Room. She wants to avoid the limelight. Izzy (Ari Lagomarsino): 21, a game designer, Stanford dropout who dreams of going viral on YouTube. Ashley (Alycia Adame): 23, narrative designer of The Room, a Twine game designer obsessed with constructing solid stories. Above: Ari Lagomarsino as Izzy. Previous page: Jerrie (Stephanie Whigham, center) with her team. From left, they are: Ashley (Alycia Adame), Izzy (Ari Lagomarsino), About the play and playwright Chris (Anne Younan) and Ronnie (Chioma Agu). All “Coded” photos are by Taylor Sanders. At the start of Coded, Jerrie pitches her idea for The Room to a venture capitalist. Quite a few curve balls fly her way in the scene. Fortunately, when playwright Kirsten Brandt pitched her play ideas to City Lights Executive Artistic Director Lisa Mallette, the mood was a whole lot more collaborative. Kirsten brought in several ideas: about the #MeToo movement, climate change, and others. The topic that she and Lisa kept coming back to was what it’s like for women facing sexism in Silicon Valley and the gaming industry in particular. “It permeates just about everything, but people don’t know about it unless they’re in the industry,” Kirsten said. Today, Kirsten has a script that blends the struggles of women game designers with the joy and wonder of creating games, and the camaraderie of a close-knit team. Along the way, the team even addresses some of the environmental issues she first raised, by creating a post-apocalyptic game, Earth Redux, that users can play inside The Room. The Room offers its users the chance to explore infinite worlds and experiences through virtual reality: solving a mystery, creating a work of art, processing anxieties, or learning how to do brain surgery. It also contains pre-created games that for users to explore The Room, so that it doesn’t daunt with a completely blank space. “There’s something beautiful about using the space therapeutically,” Kirsten said. But as all good games must have conflict, life for women game creators can be far from rosy. A recent example was 2014’s Gamergate, a storm of trolling, harassment and threats against women game creators — and a culture war of sorts about who the “true” gamers really are. Game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu were targets, as was media critic Anita Sarkeesian. Coded has many disturbing moments that call Gamergate to mind. In some cases, Kirsten actually made her play tamer than the reality. In that light, the script’s instances of workplace camaraderie, fun banter and goofy humor are very much intentional, Kirsten said. “You have to have that lightness to see why people continue to do it even when they’re being attacked. What keeps them going is the act of creation.” Kirsten Brandt. There is also hope for the future in Coded’s youngest characters, Izzy and Ashley. While they are certainly troubled by the harassment, the two seem to see more possibility and hope for the future of their industry. “They do kind of roll with it a bit because they’re young, and because they also have a view of the future that is more open,” Kirsten said. A fine example is in Kirsten’s own home, where her daughter aspires to be a game designer and seems unfazed by having been the only girl in her design class. This summer, she’s headed for game-design boot camp to learn character modeling. “I said, ‘You might be the only girl again.’ She said, ‘That’s OK.’” Kirsten once was a gamer, back in junior high with her Commodore 64. But she remembers being told that gaming wasn’t really for girls, and today she doesn’t play that much. It might be hard to find time. Besides being an interdisciplinary artist and award-winning playwright and director, Kirsten is an assistant professor of theater at San Jose State and an instigator for the Bay Area Women’s Theatre Festival, of which Coded is a part. For six seasons, she was artistic director of the experimental theater company Sledgehammer Theatre in San Diego, where she directed several of her own plays. She was also associate artistic director at San Jose Rep, where the rock musical The Snow Queen first took the stage, with Kirsten as co-author. Coded rehearsals have been a collaborative experience, with Kirsten delighted to see the actors taking more agency over their characters. She’s especially enjoyed the great conversation across the generations, both with characters and actors. “We have Xers, one millennial, and a couple who are even younger,” she said. “When we think ‘gamers,’ we never think ‘women in the their 40s,’ and women in their 40s are indeed Ashley (Alycia Adame) and Jerrie (Stephanie Whigham) in a light moment at work. gamers.” REAL-LIFE HEROES: A Few Legendary women game creators In addition to our badass cast of characters, there are so many real-life female heroes creating games. Trying to list them all would be an impossible task, but here’s a very small sample. Read on and get inspired! Tracy Fullerton With her interest in the environment, Coded’s Jerrie probably loves playing Walden, a game. This innovative game takes players to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond in 1845 to follow in his footsteps of self-reliant living in the woods. Named “Game of the Year” at Games for Change 2017, Walden is but one of creation of Tracy Fullerton, an experimental game designer and educator, and director emerita of the USC Games program. Other titles from her research center The Game Innovation Lab include Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying and The Night Journey. She has also written the textbook “Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games.” Roberta Williams Tracy Fullerton. A legend in adventure gaming, Roberta Williams was introduced to games in 1979 as a housewife whose husband, Ken, worked for a computer company. She fell hard for adventure gaming, but didn’t see enough titles out there, according to an MIT bio. So she wrote and designed Mystery House, a murder mystery game. Teaming up with her programmer husband, she made the game a reality. Soon their Sierra On-Line company was selling thousands of copies of Roberta’s games, including 1984’s iconic King’s Quest and the innovative 1995 game Phantasmagoria. Bonnie Ross You may think of first-person shooters as games played by men, but there’s a powerful woman leading the bazillion-selling Halo military / sci-fi franchise: Bonnie Ross. The game developer has been working in the industry since 1994 and is founder and head of 343 Industries (a division of Xbox Game Studios) as well as corporate vice president at Microsoft. Fortune magazine has called her one of the 10 most powerful women in video games, and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences named her to its hall of fame last year. Kellee Santiago Designer, producer and cofounder/former president of indie studio thatgamecompany, Kellee Santiago is now head of developer relations at Niantic, which The Mercury News recently described as “one of the Bay Area’s most promising, pioneering video game A photo from Bonnie Ross’ Twitter. companies.” Niantic’s titles include Pokemon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. “One of the things I love about games” like Pokemon Go, Santiago told the Merc, “is the way they can bring people together, break down walls between us and let us just be playful.” Kellee’s resume also includes cofounding Indie Fund, which helps fund the next big thing in independent games. Robin Hunicke Another local on our list is Robin Hunicke, a U.C. Santa Cruz professor of Art and Design: Games and Playable Media, and Digital Art and New Media. She’s a huge advocate of diversity in games and art, and both Robin and Kellee Santiago were major forces behind the sweeping, beautiful game Journey at thatgamecompany. Since then, Robin cofounded the San Francisco game studio Funomena. There, titles include Luna, a fable-style game about a bird trying to find its way home, rich with music and celestial puzzles.
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