About Me

Hello, world! My name is Lauren Peirson and I am a currently in my Junior year studying Game Design at DePaul University in Chicago. Games are my passion and on top of making awesome games, I also want to use my career to help make the Games Industry more welcoming for women and girls: women have always had a place in Game Design and we always will, the world just needs a little reminding sometimes!

Throughout my entire life, I have loved games – both playing and creating them. On long car rides growing up, I used to come up with games in my head that I could play in my mind while looking out the window. I had a game where I would glide on a snowboard along the power lines I saw as if I was in Subway Surfers, and another where I would imagine a giant knife that I could raise up or down to cut grass on lawns as I drove past, as well as change the shape of the knife to avoid cars and other objects. The different objects I might see on the street would give me different amounts of points or create different reactions when hit, such as trash cans giving bonus points and empty sidewalks not adding anything. Playing with my friends and brother growing up, I would make up games we could play with objects around the house (i.e., laundry bins & stuffed animals) with certain songs that went along with them and had detailed rules for point scoring. I even made a couple of board games in elementary school as class projects.

Based on all these previous games I had made, it is quite surprising that I never considered making games as my career until I found a glitch in the Valorant Ascent map where you hear the wrong sound for the texture of the wall when you hit it with your melee weapon. This made me wonder what video games looked like behind the scenes and why that mistake was there. My curiosity for how things worked turned my love for playing games into a passion for game design, and I think finding game design is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. 

I started out my time at DePaul studying Game Programming but switch to the Game Design major after realizing those classes aligned more with what I wanted to be learning. I am still figuring out my place in game design and I am loving every second of it, but for now I just know that I have some pretty cool ideas floating around in my head just waiting to be turned into something epic!