“We knew there was a market of casual game players who liked to play card games or casino games online,” she said. Desert Curse and Cash Quest would cost you $14.95Įrin said she wanted to design games for people like herself, who needed a quick break from their work but might not want to get invested in a computer game. This ended up being a cornerstone of Erin’s work on the Fortune Pack games: they had to be easy to play.įortune Raiders and Pirate’s Plunder were free. “We were taught how to design an interface to be functional as well as intuitive for the human.” 6 “Part of human factors engineering involves user interface design and usability testing,” she told me via email. As Erin remembers it, her wide variety of work experiences and education were what helped her make the transition. That sounds like a dramatic change in career path. She worked as a receptionist she wrote a paranormal young adult novel and eventually, she went to work for Steve’s software company as a game designer. But when life’s circumstances changed her plans, Erin ended up “adrift,” as she described it. She joined a master’s degree program in human-factors engineering, a field that combined physics and psychology, with the goal of working for NASA to help acclimate astronauts to spaceflight. She had graduated college with a degree in psychology, but realizing she didn’t want to be a therapist, she went back to school to follow her interest in physics instead. It was one in a long string of new experiences. 3 But for Erin, game development was a new experience. Steve had studied to be a software developer, and he later served as the president of the Association of Shareware Professionals. It was part of a collection of tiny treasure-hunting games by Dexterity Software called the Fortune Pack, 2 and for Pirate’s Plunder designer Erin Pavlina, it was actually her first time designing a game.ĭexterity Software was founded by Erin’s partner at the time, Steve Pavlina. Shareware games like these would be created by small teams, usually one or two people, and that was the case with Pirate’s Plunder as well. It belongs to a specific style of computer game development from the 90s, short-time-fillers, distributed for free as shareware, designed to be played on what were often, at the time, people’s work computers. In fact, the developer called it a “coffee break game.” 1 It fits a whole swashbuckling caper – buried treasure, ghost ships, desert islands, deadly whirlpools – into a bite-size digital board game you could play on your break at work. Pirate’s Plunder is a high-seas adventure for people who’d rather play Minesweeper.
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