I thought I'd decide to let all you lovely people know how I got interested in game development after taking part in this thread here, which was rapidly turning into another 'certain genders are good at this topic but generally crap in another'.

I would also like to thank people who have rated me just because I'm female - but I've always thought that I had knowledge that I believe is useful and I had assumed all of my rating was from that perspective alone (silly me..never mind).

Anyway, I was about 19, a waaay long time ago now, when I first came across the technical prowess of the VDU while doing a contract job with a scottish national newspaper (yes!, apart from the telly, I'd never encountered such a thing before). The job entailed transferring all the written data they had into the mainframe - in fact, the contract was supposed to be just 3 months and, even although there was 3 of us hired and all roughly doing 70wpm, the job actually lasted 18 months. With this new fancy technology and, having been shown the processes of computing and getting to know how/why and what programmers did, it started the process of opening up my mind to the possibilities of, what would become later, video gaming. Once I left this job, I took a 6mth place in college to do a sort of technical and data course which involved cobal programming but, unfortunately, my mind was not up to the job of remembering all the intricacies of this strange language and, although I left with a scrap of paper indicating it was a proper certificate (way defunct now), I didn't have any use for it.

It was while I was working for British Telecom, a couple of years later, that video gaming started to take-off and, it was at this point I turned from being an avid board-games player to a videogames player. My first m/c purchase was the Atari (can't remember the number now) and this was the time when I started actual 'game designing' - writing and sketching stuff down about the games I wanted to play, even though the technology wasn't ready for any of it at the time.

Over the years, I and my husband have amassed boxes of concepts that are just sitting around in the attic - hopefully, one day, some of them (the ones not already made by other developers - it used to amaze me how so many people have the same ideas!,) will see the light of day if/when we are in a position to blow the dust off them.

So, that is how I initially became interested and, even although I have no technical abilities in making games whatsoever, I have eventually managed to become involved, and stay involved, in the game development business (albeit mobile at present), by getting other people to do all the itsy-bitsy gritty work.

Meanwhile...hurray! for all the females in game development - lets keep the males thinking that there are not many of us about in their realm :)