Roberta Williams

Roberta Williams is a video-game developer whom Lindy West remembers as a formative childhood ideal: a creator of adventure games built around exploration, curiosity, and problem solving. West’s later account of her own efforts to reshape the boundaries of public life gives that early fascination a lasting resonance, linking the wish to build imaginary worlds with the work of building a better shared one.

Identity and Introduction

West recalls becoming obsessed as a little girl with Williams and wanting to follow her example. The games Williams made belonged to a largely extinct point-and-click adventure genre, where exploration and problem solving mattered more than combat or reflexes. In West’s memory, Williams represents not just a maker of games but someone who could create an entire landscape for others to explore.

Games and the Power of Exploration

West evokes the genre through its playful, improbable challenges. Players might wander as a corny king or a dopey spaceman, collect seemingly random objects, and discover that those objects could help rescue a gnome from bees or free a talking collie from dog prison. A magic kerchief might then be used to blindfold the King of the Dead. The games’ logic made curiosity consequential: progress came from looking closely, gathering things, and finding unexpected uses for them, rather than winning through speed or force.

A Failed Route into Game-Making

In ninth grade, West enrolled in a beginners’ programming class at a nearby community college. She was the youngest student, the only girl, and the only one without prior coding knowledge, though that knowledge was not a prerequisite. The teacher ignored her and spoke with the boys in jargon she could not follow. After two classes spent in humiliation and frustration, West stopped attending. She drifted away from video games, felt that they did not want her, and eventually forgot about Williams as she grew up.

World-Building and Narrative Significance

West recalls that she wanted to be Williams and wanted to build worlds. The adult narrative returns to that childhood ambition when it describes public refusals and the creation of boundaries for women as world-building. West explicitly calls that work world-building, extending the idea to cultural changes around online trolls, rape jokes, and the humanity of fat people. Williams’s significance in this account is therefore both personal and structural: she is the early example of a woman making interactive worlds, and the remembered wish to emulate her becomes an echo within West’s later account of making the actual world more livable.