Felida teen wins Google Play scholarship with game concept art

Christine Choi’s bedroom in her Felida home is a testament to those things she loves the most.

Funko Pop! figurines of the 17-year-old’s favorite video game characters line the top of her bookshelves. Small model Pokemon are scattered on another shelf. Art supplies spill over every surface.

And it’s where those things met that sparks flew for the Columbia River High School junior, who recently won a $10,000 Google Play scholarship for her concept art for an imagined mobile game.

Christine is the grand prize winner of Google Play’s Change the Game scholarship, an effort to encourage more girls to enter the gaming industry.

Along with the scholarship, Christine and four other finalists from around the country received a trip to Los Angeles to visit Google’s L.A. office and to attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, one of the largest and most hotly anticipated gaming trade shows in the world. That was a thrilling opportunity for the aspiring concept artist, who hopes to work for a major video game developer like Blizzard Entertainment or Bethesda Softworks someday.

“The (Bethesda) event coordinator gave me a business card,” she said, star-struck.

But Christine is likely to be in the minority if she does end up working in the video game industry. According to Google Play, 49 percent of mobile gamers are women, but women are underrepresented on development teams. Only 27.8 percent of the gaming industry is female, transgender or other gender identities, and only 23 percent of women feel there is equal treatment and opportunity for all in the industry.

“I want to be part of pioneering that new perspective,” she said.

‘Form of interactive art’

Christine’s imagined game follows a shape-shifting little girl named Mazu. Her sketchbook is filled with drawings of the character imagined as various woodland creatures, and water-colored backgrounds in soothing, natural tones.

The scholarship committee praised Christine’s artwork as “original and inspiring.”

“The game captures the exhilarating and scary process of exploring new environments, while also growing up, through an engaging story,” Google Play wrote in its announcement of the scholarship winners.

As teenagers are wont to do, Christine downplayed her own work.

“It was just concept art,” she said, shrugging.

But this isn’t the first award Christine has received for her art. She also received a Gold Key in 2017 in the Washington state Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for an illustration, and she won last year’s Southwest Washington Congressional Art Competition. Her piece, “Unity,” was hung in the U.S. Capitol.

The way Christine’s International Baccalaureate art teacher Jason Phelps tells it, her nonchalance about the award is typical. Her friends at school knew she was a finalist, but didn’t even know she’d won until it was announced to the class, he said.

Where Christine excels, he said, is in talking about the specific questions she’s trying to address in her art: questions about identity, culture and religion, he said.

“She obviously has a knack for narration and communicating through creating a story,” he said. “That really came together with this opportunity from Google.”

And indeed, when asked about the stories and themes she was imagining working on her concept art, Christine lit up. She said she wanted to design a game that would challenge players with the difficulty and story depth of blockbuster games like “Fallout 4” or “Red Dead Redemption,” but without the violence of those more mainstream games.

“People think these games are mindless killing machines,” she said.

That’s not to say she isn’t playing those games when she can — she keeps her art supplies in a tin Fallout lunch box — but she wanted to create something with broader appeal.

“To me, video games have never been just a means of entertainment,” Christine told Google Play. “I believe that video games act as a form of interactive art capable of shaping cultures and bringing people together.”