This week I was featured as Zynga’s Employee Spotlight.  Here’s the deets and my favourite cheesy picture of me (circa Command & Conquer 3 🙂 .)

Zyngites —

I’m pleased to introduce you to Nina Dobner, the employee in this week’s Zynga Spotlight who has spent the last 20 years in the video games industry.  From Nina before she joined Zynga:  “I wondered what the hell these “social games” were, so I started playing Mafia Wars for research.  When I was about level 240, I realized I wasn’t “researching” any more.  I was playing.  Obsessively.  Even after an 11 year stint at EA, this was the first time I have been this engrossed in a game!”  Nina has always been very passionate about the people she has encountered here at Zynga…“I am lucky enough to know a lot of people at this company, and boy are we smart.  I have worked at big companies before, but we have some talent HERE!”

Nina also realizes that service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth!  She is truly passionate about a cause which helps girls in Guatemala with education. The town is called Chichicastenango which is located in the El Quiché department of Guatemala and is known for its traditional K’iche’ Maya culture.  Having personally visited these girls in Guatemala, she is hoping that YOU can simply donate this great cause (more below on question 16).

Nina has made an impact at Zynga and he is certainly someone we are proud to have in the Zynga family!

Enjoy!

Colleen

The Zynga Spotlight

Nina Dobner – Chief of Staff, CCO division

1. 1.      What brought you to Zynga and what did you do before?

I have worked in the video game industry for 20 years.  I wondered what the hell these “social games” were, so I started playing Mafia Wars for research.  When I was about level 240, I realized I wasn’t “researching” any more.  I was playing.  Obsessively.  Even after an 11 year stint at EA, this was the first time I have been this engrossed in a game.  I needed to be part of it.  (Before that, I wrote children’s stories for Dorling Kindersley, and before that I was a lexicographer at OUP.  Don’t bet me on the definition of a word.  I won $1000 just this week on one 😉

1. 2.      What is your favorite thing about working at Zynga? (Other than the free food.)  

The people.  I am lucky enough to know a lot of people at this company, and boy are we smart.  I have worked at big companies before, but we have some talent HERE!

1. 3.      Ok, now go ahead and talk about the free food. What’s your favorite perk at Zynga? Any perks you’d like to see us add?

I am a vegetarian, and I love that Zynga even caters for us.  I do miss the acupuncture, but I hear that the massage is great.  I am going to try that next.

1. 4.      What do you want to see from Zynga in the next year?

I want the market and our families to know that not everything you read in the press is true.  Gamastruta and TechCrunch?  They are US Weekly for us tech people.  Sure, I love to read the gossip about my ex-friends and colleagues as much as the next person, but I want everyone to realize we have a real business here.  I want to see Zynga lead not follow, expand our audience, win on mobile, own out our own gaming platform.  And without a word of b*llshit, I think we are poised to do those things.  It is up to us now.  When Mark says “be your own CEO”, he means it.  Every person in this company can inflect Zynga.

1. 5.      What’s been your favorite moment thus far at Zynga?

This is such a selfish one, but it has to be when we privately hired out the Rockefeller ice-skating rink to celebrate the success of FrontierVille.  It was the week that they lit the tree in NY.   The rink was surrounded by mounted policeman and thousands of people.  Every time anyone (and by anyone I mostly mean “me”) fell over, the entire “audience” would hoot and laugh and catcall.  SO COOL!!

1. 6.      Imagine I’m your mom. I know it’s weird, but how would you describe what you do at Zynga to her?

I tell her to imagine I am a wedding coordinator.  I try and make people who want the same thing (a beautiful wedding) agree on the details – in the World of games entertainment.

1. 7.      Dog person or cat person? If dog person, do you have a favorite dog at Zynga? If cat person, please name your favorite fictional cat character.

I love both.  I used to breed ocicats.  They are spotted silver cats that think they are dogs.  They fetch, they heel.  I would definitely have another.  But right now, I really want a scrappy mutt dog.

1. 8.      What’s your favorite story you’ve either heard/experienced about Zynga games or players?

To be personal again, I am an English girl living in America.  I am back in touch with my (English) godparents, who live in Australia, because of Farmville.  I am good friends with my (London) cousin’s best friend, because of Mafia Wars.  I have never met him!  This continues to be cool to me.  We are changing the World.

1. 9.      What’s something that people don’t know about you/what’s a secret skill of yours?

Hmm, well I already admitted the dictionaries.  Anyone that is facebook friends with me knows I love to cook…. Um… I’m a life guard.  That is pretty lame, isn’t it? (I was figuring the cherry stalk thing wouldn’t fly 😉

1. 10.  If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive who would it be?

I have had dinner with a couple of my idols, actually (Michael Caine FOREVER!) so I keep having to add new ones.  David Attenborough is up there, but my current obsession is Lana Del Rey.  How did she get to be that cool so young?

1. 11.  What would you do if I gave you anything right now? What would it be?

Wow – okay what _I_ want right now, is too personal to ask for.  But what I want from YOU right now… see the charity section below.

1. 12.  Fill in the blank: When you are not at Zynga, you’re ______.

Skydiving, diving, drinking, cooking, riding my motorcycle.  Anything rather than sitting on my a*s 🙂 .

1. 13.  What is your favorite game? (Zynga or non-Zynga)

Bubble Safari on the computer, Scramble on my phone. Cards Against Humanity (which is Apples to Apples for horrible people!)

1. 14.  What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Photo Journalist

1. 15.   What profession other than yours would you NOT like?

Bank Clerk.  Anything 9-5 and non- creative.  Actually, anywhere I can’t wear jeans to work.

1. 16.   What charity do you support?

So this is where I would love some help.  I am PASSIONATE about this cause.  Check out www.mayacrew.org.  This is an organization that helps girls in Guatemala with education.  They have graduated thousands of children in the past few years.  And this year they are short of their yearly target.  I have actually been to Chichicastenango.  The trickle-down effect they are creating is changing an entire region.  If only a few of you read this far and can donate even $10, it would make a huge difference. (Remember, Zynga will match you donation right here: http://zyngaorg.yourcause.com/.  You will need to search for them via their EIN number: 651259289). I don’t want to bore people that aren’t interested, but if you want to know why I think this is worth your lunch money, please ping me personally.  I would be happy to talk you ear off!

Landing tonight back at SFO.  The setting sun was sandwiched between fog and low cloud cover. It looked like a snake’s eye, the eye of sauron… or at the very least a Rothko painting :).

I am sick as a dog.  I am so hoarse that I am actually mute.  Right now I am running a bath and microwaving some soup.  Early night for me!

I am at a hackathan-style prototyping event in McKinney, Texas.  McKinney is our Words With Friends studio. They are some of the most close-knit, fun, creative people I have ever met.  They also work out of, what is certainly, the most beautiful Zynga:

Now I just have to convince them to invite me back, so that I can bring a REAL camera and photograph it properly – ooooh, maybe in cold snow-blanketed Winter light!

The best thing about blogging is that, what seems to be a one-way outreach, turns into a very beneficial thing for me.  As well as the cathartic outlet it provides me, it brings beauty into my life.  Not one, but two people sent me poetry after my last post.  One I had read before and appreciated like polishing my favourite silver, the other was new to me – and had the foreignness of America, and the universal beauty of pain and strength.  Who knew that today I would end up reading poetry?   And with my insomnia, I will choose a book out of poetry section of my library.  What old friends are there?

There are reasons you should never EVER open the floodgates to tears.  Like the little Dutch boy, you should always keep your finger in the dyke to stop the deluge.  As well as crying in yoga, I sobbed my way through the last 2 songs in a (candle-lit) spin class Lisa took me to in New York.  On the plane home, they were showing “The Odd Life of Timothy Green”.  It is a Jennifer Garner movie in which she and he husband are unable to conceive – and yet a 4-year old boy magically appears to complete their family for a short time.  Yeah, it was a big tear-jerker for me.  The movie on the way over was slightly less emotional: Liberal Arts.  I reminded me of my student days.

I read English language and literature at St Anne’s College in Oxford.  As well as being the usual “tortured teenager” (who thought Sylvia Plath was the only one could understand her), I read voraciously.  I embraced magical realism (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie,  Isabelle Allende, Milan Kundera.  The title “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting always resonated with me).   I read the entire works of Dickens in one week.  Now the whole Dickensian London is just one big smushed memory to me – in which the characters move interchangeably.  I love Jacobean Tragedy, I read and re-read the entire works of Shakespeare.   I always loved the Romantics.  Blake was my favourite.  Somehow I ended up with 2 copies of “Songs of Innocence and Experience”.  One has a heart-felt inscription to me, but the signature is illegible and the “gifter” lost in murky waters of my student memory.

Below are a couple of quotations (from memory so they might not be quite accurate) that bring tears to my eyes.

Sylvia Plath’s Elm

I know the bottom, she said. I know it with my great tap root,

It is what you fear.

I do not fear it, I have been there.

Blake ‘s Garden of Love

I went to the garden of love

And saw what I had never seen.

A chapel was built in the middle

Where I used to play on the green

And the gates of the chapel were shut

And “thou shalt not” written over the door

So I turned to the garden of love

That so many flowers bore.

The garden was filled with graves

And tombstones were flowers should be

And priest in black gown were walking their rounds

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

I am trying something new right now.  I am leaving my iPhone in my purse and carrying a pad and pencil in my back pocket.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is likely to be less distracting when I simply want to jot down an idea.  We’ll see how it works out.

Not that it concerns me (perhaps as much as it should), but this has the added benefits of not keeping a electromagnetic device right next to my body.  There are a number of studies coming out right now suggesting that mobile phone usage is bad for us.  I didn’t look up all the references, but here is just one.  (Jury is out on whether this is really true, but warning bells are definitively starting to toll.)

Most studies seem to concentrate on how carrying a phone in your front pocket can severely lower a man’s testosterone and fertility. There are so many reputable studies on this now that there is a movement to try and enforce new mobile phone boxes to carry a warning label, just like cigarettes.  (Remember when people campaigned that cigarettes were NOT harmful?)  The spin doctors are in full effect.  It reminds me of the movie “Thank You for Smoking”.  Just recently, mobile phone companies won the right to NOT carry the warning, but instead committed to advertising campaigns that make it seem “cooler” to carry your phone in your back pocket.

The naysayers also list one other common “mistake” for people trying to become pregnant…?  Sitting with your laptop on your lap (like I am doing right now!)

My therapist complimented me on my new handbag.  I thanked her but said I had a twinge of guilt about it.  A few days earlier at a party, I had heard people in the hallway talking about it.  The girls had been complimenting it and wondering whose it was, and one of the guys said “that looks like it just fell off a baby cow!”

It actually shocked me.  Someone told me most leather goods are a by-product of the meat industry.  But then I thought about it further, well… if the farmer is selling his cow for meat + leather, he is getting a better price for it. If he could sell it only for the price of the meat, the price of meat would go up and less people would eat meat….  I told this to Sarah half-jokingly on the way out of the door.  She replied, “You are now trying to save all of the cows in the world.  Write it on your list.  Right after: 9am. Get up. Save World.” 🙂  She cracks me up.

[Total aside as I know the photo is a weird one.  That was taken from the back of a moving bike as we rode down the backside of the Stelvio trail in Italy.  It was the only picture I could think of that I had ever taken of a cow.  That was an amazing motorcycle trip.]

The interwebs presented me with something new this morning.  What if “we the people” could choose what we wanted to scientifically invest in?  I thought this was an interesting idea.  The main complaint seems to be that we should not allow the “stupid majority of the population” to decide what gets funded.  Now, I’m not sure that the “stupidity majority” are typically in the habit of funding scientific experiments, but I could be wrong about that 😉

I applaud the goal to create “an open model of scientific research”, but I think I might have to give this one a miss.  The animal testing gets me every time.  Interesting concept, though.  Check it out for yourselves.

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/11106-crowdsourcing-discovery

I’m busy running around this weekend, so some of these posts are coming out of order.  When I went to yoga on Wednesday, they asked us what we are thankful I started crying.  (Luckily it was during savasana and nobody noticed.)  I am so grateful for my friends and family (especially my two beautiful nieces).  I am thankful I was born in a first-world country, and that I now live in another.  And on Thanksgiving day itself, I was thankful for bourbon pecan pie, with maple vanilla whipped cream.

I got this recipe from the interewebs.  It was a no “high fructose corn syrup” version. I substituted the tablespoon of milk for a teaspoon of cream and 2 tablespoon of bourbon. It worked about really well. (Voted best of all 3 pies by Rex.  That’s good enough for me.)

If you are reading this you blog, you already know that I have been getting into a lot of self healing, through yoga, relaxation, food, alternative medicine, etc.  But even I had to laugh at myself today when I was simultaneously running a bath, boiling pans of water, and making a juice, naked in the kitchen!

I wasn’t even hungry.  The only reason I was making a juice was that I had been at a friend’s “day-after-thanksgiving party” and all I had eaten was mashed potatoes and pie.  When I got home I was thirsty, so I figured I might as well make a juice and get some nutrients in there 🙂