Interview with Donna Prior
Transcript after the jump.
Pete Trerice: Hey guys, it's Pete Trerice with DarthHater.com and I have tracked down the elusive Donna from the forums. First off, we'll have a little introduction.
Donna Prior: Hi there guys, how are ya?
Pete: Donna, let's talk about some of your past work leading up to BioWare. What have you done in the past that helped you get prepared to work for BioWare?
Donna: Well, it's really funny, 'cause I come from an IT field and before that I was a DJ and a bartender for ten years. So dealing with roudy people really helps you get in to community. I think Sean mentioned something about having a thick skin? So a thick skin, good sense of humor, but really, you have to actually like people, you have to like talking to people and to help people. With my past work, I worked on another MMO before this one...
Pete: Which one?
Donna: It was Pirates of the Burning Sea.
Pete: Very cool.
Donna: So I spent a lot of time doing fan meet-ups, we did a ton of them when the game was in beta, and going to conventions, demoing the game. When this game came out, everyone knows that I'm the biggest Star Wars nerd, although after coming to this game, I realized how much I don't know about Star Wars when I used to out-Star Wars everyone I know. Thanks to everybody in the Star Wars area of the forums... I spend so much time on wookiepedia now, thanks.
Pete: How did you get the job at BioWare?
Donna: When I heard that there were jobs available, and everybody knew about the game, I had signed up on the forums a long time ago under another game account which I use for other games, and I'm not telling you what it is, when the positions came open, everybody said, "Donna, you need to apply 'cause you're the biggest Star Wars nerd ever, you're an awesome forum moderator, so go for it" And I did
Pete: So, do you use that other alias on the forums to bump posts or get them put to the dev tracker?
Donna: Y'know, I wish I could, but truly, as much as we talk about being evil and Sith-y and Darth-y, um... no. I don't, I retired my other account, so I don't post on my original thing. We have the freedom to say a lot of stuff anyway, to put our personalities out there, so if I want to bump something up, I'll just bump it with my mod name.
Pete: Tell us what a day-in-the-life of a forum mod is like.
Donna: The first thing I do is watch the Deceived trailer, y'know, the big Deceived trailer and get all pumped up and just "rrrraaah" and I get the goosebumps and say "This is what Star Wars is supposed to be" Then we go in and we chuck all the bad stuff, then I usually just over to Off-Topic, see what's going on, get the kinda "mood of the forums", tuck over to General and then we coordinate through out the day of when we see repeated threads...and thanks everybody for reporting those 'cause we really are working on tightening up, getting the information out there and trying to update the F.A.Q. and stuff. That's pretty much what we do, we discuss issues, so all you people who do post in the website's feedback area, we actually do show that with the team, we show that to pass on to the web team so your suggestions are being read.
Pete: Do you wonder if people even bother to read the titles of threads on the front page or even bother to read before they reply?
Donna: I stopped thinking that a long time ago, I actually started being a forum troll waay before I every started being a forum moderator, so I'm pretty sure... there's times when I don't read them in other forums, and I think that they're talking about one thing but... sometimes the difficulty here is that people will write something as a title but it's not what they really wanna say. Sometimes people will skip over titles because the meat of the post is really what you're looking for.
Pete: What is your favorite cat picture you've gotten so far?
Donna: Oh, my goodness, well some of the favorite ones I have are received by PM because we can't have them public. Thanks guys, you're really nice that way. But I have laughed at just about every one, I love all the ones that are Star Wars-related, anything that's are related to "It's a trap" "itz a tarp", those are all my favorites.
Pete: Why cats, and why not dogs?
Donna: Y'know, actually, someone did start doing a little dog thing for me but, it didn't ever really seem to take off, maybe all the little dogs can kind of be "doo-da-doo-da-doo" and cats are supposed to be so smart, it's kinda funny not to see them being so smart.
Pete: One last question, what advice would you give to somebody that's looking to get into the industry in general?
Donna: I've answered this question a lot, even in our forums via PM, but seriously, no matter what you want to do in the industry, take a career you want to do, regardless of the industry. If you want to be a programmer, be a programmer, learn all the programming you can, and apply for all kinds of jobs, because having that experience will help you get into the industry. If you start doing programming for an...insurance company or something, that experience will help in the industry because the only thing different between the two is the industry itself.
So get your education towards what you want to do with your life, and that would be my advice, is that if you want to design, start designing your own games. Board games, card games, all that experience helps because if you just get a degree that says "oh, I'm a game designer" you've gotta be able to prove that you can do it to get on, especially, a large title. Look at the smaller ones, look at the indie games,
Pete: Castle Crasher and some of those guys that it's a low budget, well-written, well developed game.
Donna: ...exactly. There's some great indie games out there, some Flash games, look at doing some of that stuff, when you look at Flash, there's Flash artists, Flash programmers, and I'm always seeing job postings for developers, so learn both sides of it, learn the art, and learn the development. Do what you want to do regardless of industry.
Pete: Any messages for the fans out there listening?
Donna: Oh dear. Well, we've got a great picture of Darth Sean that we're going to pass off to you guys, but thanks for being a great community, some of you guys are really awesome, you've been really great with us as we've built out team, all of you folks that have been really patient, we really appreciate it and we look forward to tightening up the team and tightening up the community to being a really awesome place to be.
Pete: Well Donna, thanks for taking the time to give us an interview, we really appreciate it, and thanks for everything at PAX and everything you do on the website.
Donna: Oh, it's my pleasure, I was happy to do it
Thanks to Bonklers for the transcript.
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