The Rural We: Julia Keren-Detar
The game designer and developer, who lives in Valatie, will be giving talks about the history of games and the gaming industry.
Whether board games or video games, there’s an art and a science to their design you might not be aware of. But there’s an expert in our midst who can explain everything from the history of American board games to the latest video game developments. Julia Keren-Detar, a game designer and developer who lives in Valatie with her husband and two children, will be giving two lectures in the "A History of Games" series at the Kinderhook Memorial Library, co-sponsored by the Columbia County Historical Society. On Feb. 21, she’ll be presenting “Breaking Into the Video Games Industry,” and on Feb. 29, her topic will be “How History Shaped Design: Early American Board Games.” The lectures are free.
I’m from Ohio, but my mom was born in North Adams — my family worked at the Sprague Electric Company before it turned into MASS MoCA. We’d come up every summer to be with relatives. I fell in love with the area and always wanted to live here. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art, I got a job in NYC and would drive through Columbia County to the Berkshires to see my grandma. We achieved the dream of moving up here about six years ago. My husband was able to work remotely, and I’d been doing that already. It’s been amazing living here.
I was a ceramics major, but while I was at school, I stumbled across Flash, a software program where you could draw stuff, bring it to life, make it interactive. I got sucked into it and started making Flash games. In my first jobs in the city, I was developing games like solitaire, mah-jongg, crossword puzzles, Sudoku and other downloaded games in Flash. For publishers, like Hearst, these games were a way to bring people to their sites and increase retention.
My husband is an independent game developer and was working on a prototype that was getting a lot of attention. I decided to help him on that project, along with another couple. It’s called Mushroom 11, a PC game about a fungus you control by deleting and regrowing parts of yourself. It got really big and allowed us to travel and go to a lot of expos and events.
Team Mushroom: Two married couples making a game
Then I tried my hand at educational games, but I missed the commercial video games. I now work for Spry Fox, a video game-producing company, where the games are delightful, warm and fun.
The game industry is a huge industry, and a very expressive one. It’s an amazing field, an amazing art form, filled with interesting topics and experiences. The educational games are a great method for learning disabilities, too — it’s a way in for some to grasp new concepts.
