Emma Kuhlman: Senior Emma Kuhlman is pursuing a career in video game development

Head pressed against the floor, then-7-year-old Emma Kuhlman peered through the dusty crack between her basement couch and carpet, hoping her dad wouldn’t notice. She breathed softly.

Inches away, her dad played “The Last of Us” on PlayStation 3 — a game far too gory to let his daughter watch. So instead of sitting beside him, she settled for spying between furniture gaps, aweing at the complex storylines and high-quality animation for hours — and falling in love.

It’s a love that fueled third-grade ritualistic after school “Battlefront” marathons, eyes six-inches from the TV — with all boys, because girls didn’t play video games. It’s a love that compelled her to take digital design classes since eighth grade, taking a personalized study for design alone this year as the only one at that level. It’s a love that had her saving up to buy a $2,000 gaming PC her sophomore year, plus another $1,000 in keyboard, monitor and accessories.

Emma will pursue her love of video games next year, but not from behind the couch — behind a computer at Northwestern University, studying as a film major with the hope to become a game developer after college. 

“Film requires a lot of design, film editing and Photoshop courses for the major,” Emma said. “Those can obviously all be applied to creating video games. Any animated TV shows or movies are produced very similarly, so a lot of those skills could be applied.”

She didn’t know that game development was a real possibility until her design teacher Jennifer Hair brought it up. Hair has caught on to Emma’s strengths after spending all four of high school with her, listening to 90’s jam bands as Emma works on movie posters, DECA presentations and Bar Mitzvah logos.

“She’s so creative and has so many different, original thoughts on making detailed graphics and characters,” Hair said. “She’s very astute at molding together music, video, visual arts, all of it together, which is why I think she likes game design.”

From attending a Women in Gaming conference at Johnson County Community College last fall to writing dozens of pages on the history of video games for her IB extended essay, Emma’s gearing up for a career in the gaming industry. After college, she wants to get a job at a studio “anywhere but Kansas” and work in design or coding. There, she’ll get to make her mark on the industry she’s admired for a lifetime — and see her work published to the world.

“I’d be so incredibly proud, especially because [a game] would be a product that I could enjoy that my family and friends could also enjoy,” Emma said. “That’s kind of what sets games apart from other art forms.”