I’m Caryl.
here’s my bio from Webmonkey (circa 1999)
After growing up in Las Vegas, Nevada, Caryl headed east to study journalism. After five years of East Coast winters, she moved back to the West Coast, settling down in San Francisco, where she spent five years as a professional cook. One day she sat down at a friend’s Mac and hasn’t looked back. Her Web career began as a project manager for PlanetOut, an Internet startup that uses live chat, message boards, transactions, and databases to build a thriving online gay community. Post-PNO, Caryl was the technology manager for the ad sales department of Wired Digital, where she studied new and innovative ad units with an eye toward protecting the user experience while still bringing in the bucks. Even though she has ceased to work with online advertising on a daily basis, she still gets irked by broken ad banners.
and here’s a more recent bit that I wrote for a conference brochure (circa 2006)
With over 12 years of experience building online communities, Caryl most recently managed the websites for The Sims and Simcity before creating and launching the website for The Sims 2. Her current project is Spore, where she is the Pollinated Content Producer – designing and developing the ingame, behind-the-scenes content sharing features. Prior to working at Maxis, Caryl was on the launch team for PlanetOut and then worked at HotWired – the online arm of Wired Magazine.
Working with communities that center around content creation has shown Caryl that given the chance users will make creative choices that push the original game design into new and interesting directions. And that game developers can apply the learnings from those emergent behaviors to make better games.
