Brenda Brathwaite

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A 25 year veteran of the video game industry, Brenda Brathwaite is a contract game designer and professor of game development and interactive design at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. She has worked on 22 internationally known titles, including Def Jam: Icon, Playboy: The Mansion, Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes, the award-winning Wizardry series and the award-winning Jagged Alliance series of video games.

According to a Next Generation magazine article[1] written by Ernest Adams, Brathwaite is the longest, continuously serving woman in video game development today.

Brenda began her career in 1981 at game maker Sir-tech Software, Inc. working on the Wizardry series of role-playing games first as a tester and later moving up through the design and content creation ranks to lead designer on the award-winning series. She was employed with Sir-tech for 18 years before moving on to game maker Atari.

In 2005, Brathwaite founded the International Game Developers Sex Special Interest group and has extensively studied adult content in video games. Since working on Playboy, she has studied sexual content in video games and is regularly interviewed about the subject in the media. She has written a book on the subject, Sex in Video Games.

In 2006, Brathwaite was named one of the 100 most influential women in the game industry by Next Generation magazine and her peers, and Nerve magazine cited her as a “New Radical” - one of “the 50 artists, actors, authors, activists and icons who are making the world a more stimulating place”. In the spring of 2007, she was awarded the Presidential Fellowship at Savannah College of Art and Design to develop an exhibit and presentation titled, “What You Don’t Know About Video Games…”. The project is slated for a Fall 2007 debut.

Brathwaite is an active member of the International Game Developers Association and a passionate anti-censorship advocate and a proponent of parental rating awareness. She is a regular speaker at universities and conferences, most recently the Idea City Conference 2007, Game Developers Conference 2007, Montreal Games Summit 2006, Game Developers Conference 2006, Future Play 2005, Game Developers Conference 2005, and the Women in Games Conference (a part of the Austin Games Conference) 2005. She has lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University and Clarkson University.

Brenda was born in Ogdensburg, New York and is a graduate of Clarkson University.