Above: Kate Compton, director of play at The LEGO Group (photo by Alastair Philip Wiper)
Kate Compton (Ph.D. ’19, computer science) likes to yell affirmations at the ocean.
It’s what you need to do to be a top software engineer for Electronic Arts, designing games like Spore and SimCity; writing code that may influence the Twitter-bot phenomenon; and writing a 700-plus-page dissertation on how to nurture people’s intrinsic
The atrium at the LEGO campus (photo by Alastair Philip Wiper)
ability to create—which will eventually lead you to Denmark to take the position of director of play at The LEGO Group. All because you told the ocean to keep waving.
Perhaps it’s not just the ocean affirmations, but it’s also Compton’s love for her environment and the people she surrounds herself with, always wanting them to feel and do their best.
“I found communities with love and support, and now I pay back into those communities—you’ll get zero grade points on it—but that’s the stuff that’ll last a lifetime,” Compton said.
Eyes lit, fire ignited, Compton’s deference to her craft is unmistakable. She is a coder, and more importantly, she is a creator. She is not a gatekeeper; she is, in fact, a teacher. She even taught this reporter a new word, autotelic (more on that in a bit).
While many game-design engineers’ origin stories come from hours of laboring to complete all the levels of Mario Kart or Donkey Kong, Compton’s background is a little different.
“For me, it was building dollhouses. I liked making spaces I could invite people into,” Compton said. “When I started making my own digital spaces, it scratched the same itch for me—to make a strange little space where you can invite people into.”
After getting her media studies B.A. at Pomona College and her M.S. in digital media from Georgia Tech, Compton went to work at Electronic Arts. One of her most notable projects was her work on Spore—a video game where players create their own universe, from the planets to the creatures that live on them.
Compton worked as a particle effects artist for the game.
“I would use algorithms to move particles around to sculpt planets. For a while, my business card said I was a geological choreographer,” Compton said.
The game was known for its creature creator, where people could design their own living things. From little kids to accountants at their desk jobs, users loved how creative and skilled they felt when designing their creatures.
Using a similar concept, the Spore team made a new creator tool and invited the makers of the animated sketch comedy series Robot Chicken to create their own games. There sat a room of the world’s best creatives using a tool that did not evoke the same satisfaction that the creature creator had had on a wide range of people. Compton wanted to find out how to make better tools, and that was the impetus for her to seek a doctorate.
“I was sad that I was no longer growing at work. You have to keep growing and learning, because when you stop that’s when you start dying,” said Compton. “There was a place just over the hill where people were moving and growing, so it made sense for me to come down to Santa Cruz.”
Human creativity fascinated her. She says that everyone constantly creates, in each hollow of time they get. And most people who pick up a hobby like making pottery are doing it for an autotelic purpose, where the act of doing something is for the sole purpose of doing it—not in the hopes of creating a business to sell their pottery.
One of Compton’s autotelic inventions was her open-source code Tracery, a text-generating tool that could be used to create chatbots, game narratives, stories, and more. She invented it one weekend for a design project. By 2023, over 200,000 bots used Tracery’s code on what was then Twitter (now X).
With computational media professors like Michael Mateas and Jim Whitehead, Compton wrote her thesis feeling supported. Along the way, Compton met other students who have since become top names in the industry, like Chaim Gingold (Ph.D. ’16, computer science), who coded the creature creator for Spore.
Compton remembered when a digital arts and new media M.F.A. student was working on an interactive theater AI piece, and came to work with the Computer Science Department. The student spent time developing an AI system to go with the piece, but realized what was created did not serve the goals of the piece. The computer science (now computational media) professors supported using less-advanced technology for the purpose of the art.
“It’s a department that’s open to people understanding what matters, and committing to building a really beautiful, good thing no matter what field that ends up being in. A beautiful research problem does not respect the boundary of fields,” Compton said.
Since her time at UC Santa Cruz, Compton has taught computer science courses at Northwestern University, consulted with startups in Silicon Valley, and even dabbled in her own startup venture.
All the blood, sweat, and tears she put into her novel-sized dissertation got her to her current job. Remember that, not too long ago, she was building dollhouses.
Where Compton’s creativity will take her next, who knows? But, for all the students out there pursuing their dream, follow her advice: Don’t let the confines of your field keep you limited.
Also, she advises:
“Touch grass, engage with nature. When there’s seasonality in California, engage with it. Go shout encouragement to the ocean when you feel stressed,” Compton said. “Doing a solid for others whether it’s making the ocean feel good about itself or going to help a friend is good for your soul.”