Until beginning her career as a technical programmer, Corrinne Yu attended California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, to study electrical engineering. Corrinne Yu is an awesome individual. People have most known her as the principal programmer for the Halo team at Microsoft. Unlike what people expected from a petite Asian woman, she dresses like a rock star and speaks about the theory of programming. When we look at the issue of not enough women going into programming as a discipline, Corrinne is an inspiration.
Besides working as a game programmer, Yu developed the Rockwell International California Space Shuttle program. At LINAC in California, she designed and performed accelerator experiments and the Brookhaven National Laboratory accelerator. Her studies in nuclear physics awarded her a U.S. Department of Energy. For 2 years in a row, she was nominated and judged for her programming work, Corrinne Yu has won Best in Innovation globally at a Game Developers Conference in 2009. In 2010, Kotaku named Yu as one of the top 10 female players of the last decade. She is the only Technology Manager on this list and the only Engine Programmer. She served on a space shuttle program, received a nuclear science prize… She’s intelligent and could have any job she liked. But what attracted her to STEM, especially the mathematics aspect, is that “it is intriguing to solve how complex pieces fit together in a beautifully simple way.” How much imaginative control they have in building full environments or self-consistent structures is what she loves about software engineering. In an interview, Corrinne Yu said:
“As a comparison, in aerospace, for example, we own with our team a very important piece of simulation of one aspect of the spacecraft’s construction or its trajectory. With game engine programming, we program a completely self-consistent world with photons traversing through game materials in just the right way, with faces and bodies acting and reacting just so, and with every extra bit of engineering effort we put forth, we make the gaming immersion just this much deeper and richer for the player playing the game. It is a very mentally fulfilling sort of career.”
We have so many games nowadays that consumers usually associate a game’s engine with the quality of graphics as if that’s all it’s good for. But a good game engine has an even bigger impact on the game. It affects whether players just meet other co-op players at a time, or if they actually collaborate in gameplay. It determines how many opponents you will battle at one time, and how stupid or clever they are left to care about attacking you. It determines how dumb or wise your enemies can be depending on how little or how much of the world the opponent can take into account and digest from what they can see and process. It influences how strategically fair the enemies will be if the details withheld from their offensive plans are blurred. Not only does an engine influence gameplay, the introduction of an engine explicitly indicates the various styles of play achievable by pre-production of early technical decisions.
Corrinne Yu expected the large communication would make some great strides in gaming and entertainment technology. In the next few years, the final barriers of interactivity will descend. We should expect a richer experience than ever before in multiplayer gaming, with broader and more realistic ways in which players can compete and play against each other. Many games are gaining enormous popularity due to the rise of the interaction aspect, from simple games like Snake.io or Among Us to more complex games like League of Legends or Fortnite. In this timeframe, visual and physical modeling can become very advanced. She also expected fine lines between what is visual, what is a simulation, and what is physical, or simulation of physics. Ironically, the next challenge Yu anticipated is not so much how many things programmers can do, but as the systems they develop become exponentially complex and interdependent on each other, it is a matter of managing lag and latency.
Corrinne Yu always inspires women to study STEM. Game programming is a fantastic career that bridges the gap between advanced hardware design, world simulation, mathematics, and many scientifically satisfying areas. In game programming, there is more than one path into a career, and it might be easier to get in than people expect.
Cites
Schwimmer, Trina. “The Ten Most Influential Women In Games Of The Past Decade.” Kotaku, Kotaku, 21 June 2013, kotaku.com/the-ten-most-influential-women-in-games-of-the-past-dec-5438346.
Staff, IGN. “Ion Storm Exodus Continues.” IGN, IGN, 21 June 2012, www.ign.com/articles/1998/11/21/ion-storm-exodus-continues.
GG-AngelThanatos. “Girl Gamer.” Zine ” Article ” Women in Gaming: Halo’s Corrinne Yu, Girl Gamer Forum, 2 July 2018, web.archive.org/web/20120109045849/www.girlgamer.com/zine/article/1685/.
Thank you for sharing! This is a very thorough biography, I can tell you put a lot of thought into writing it. Great work!