IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2022 - 16

of 1976, before her freshman year in college,
she sold her car race game Speedway
to RCA for its Studio II, making her
the first indie game developer.
Although Weisbecker's career as a
game designer at RCA was short lived,
her work there helped her identify what
it was she wanted and didn't want out of
a career. She studied at Rider University
in New Jersey, graduating with a double
major in actuarial science and decision
science and computers. She would return
to school years later to add on a bachelor's
degree in electrical engineering and
a master's degree in computer science.
(Doctors and engineers, her father would
always tell her, are the two fields where
you need the piece of paper as much as
you need the know-how.)
Throughout her career, her two successful,
intellectually driven parents,
both drawn to education in their own
ways, would be incredibly influential as
she looked for work that would satisfy
her interest in emergent behavior, dramatic
storytelling, and the magic behind
making a computer look like it's behaving
and has a personality.
An Early Interest in
Artificial Intelligence
Her interests-and career search-started
in kindergarten. " The most fun I ever
had was when I was accidentally assigned
an AI (artificial intelligence) problem in
kindergarten, " Weisbecker says. " I removed
a block. Behind it, there was a giant
spider as big as my fist. It was right there
so I screamed. The teacher said the greatest
thing in the world. She said, 'Don't
you think the spider is more afraid of you
than you are of it?' I was fascinated by that
question because I was pretty darn sure I
was more scared of that spider than the
spider was of me. "
So she sat there by the blocks, thinking
about how she could compare how
scared the spider was with how scared
she was so that she could prove to the
teacher that, despite their obvious difference
in size, she was sure she was more
afraid of the spider.
First, she hypothesized, the spider
was so small that when he looked out
from the blocks with his limited view,
he probably didn't realize her finger
was connected to her body. He probably
wasn't afraid of one small kindergartener's
finger.
Second, spiders were tiny, and tiny
creatures like ants and butterflies didn't
seem to have emotions like cats and dogs,
so maybe the spider couldn't feel fear,
in which case, she was definitely more
afraid. If the spider's fear was zero, whatever
amount of fear she felt was larger.
" I was so excited that I had a good
answer for the teacher when she came
back, " Weisbecker says. " But there's such
a thing as a rhetorical question, needless
to say, and she never came back. "
But this moment with the spider
stuck with her. Over the years, she
thought about this interaction and others
like it. Curiosity for these sorts of
questions was something that was just
in her. That was what she wanted to
Joyce Weisbecker became the first
indie game developer when she sold
her car race game Speedway to RCA
for its Studio II in 1976.
16
study in college. But what was it?
" I looked into philosophy course catalogs.
There wasn't a single course that
IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2022
looked like what I wanted, " she says.
" From the get-go, I knew that no one
knew what I was interested in. It wasn't
entomology. It wasn't philosophy. I just
wanted to know how a spider reacts to
the world, what's going on in the spider's
brain, if that spider was like a machine
or if there were thoughts and emotions. "
Weisbecker was on a search to find
the subject that dealt with those questions
so that she could then find a career.
A Unique Family
Her father, not surprisingly, was on the
same page. Joseph was not just an engineer
at RCA, he was also a magician and a
game inventor. He was intelligent, philosophical,
and playful. He was attuned to
the ways in which people think and he
understood the power of suggestion that
is so important to magicians. He loved to
entertain people, not as a way to make
money but because it was so much fun.
Take his coin-operated (op) video
games. Even though RCA placed only a
Weisbecker, shown here in 1989, is
the daughter of Joseph Weisbecker,
the engineer who led RCA into a
new technological era with his 8-bit
microprocessor architecture.
IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2022

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