Caryl Shaw

Pollinated Content Producer, Spore, Maxis (San Francisco

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.