Cheryl’s Current Roles
- Creative Director, Game Studio
The Pokémon Company International - Adjunct Faculty (Video Games)
Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz College - Owner, Principal, and Keynote Speaker
Ideaplatz, LLC - Author and Speaker, Rosenfeld Media
Design Beyond Devices and The Game Development Strategy Guide - Full Voting Member
BAFTA, North America Games Chapter
A voice for creators REBUILDING TECH AND MEDIA
the best-kept secret in Creative leadership
You may not have heard of Cheryl Platz yet, but she’s worked on technology that you’ve either bought, played, or been impacted by indirectly. Her hands-on design work has impacted, directly or indirectly, billions of people over the past 2 decades.
Yes, billions of people: from hundreds of millions of gamers at Riot, Disney, EA, Scopely, and Pokémon to 800 million Windows 10 users, 100 million Alexa notifications users, and hundreds of thousands of companies on the Azure platform and PowerApps platforms powering corporate and consumer experiences – plus her time helping the Gates Foundation modernize their teleconferencing which ended up just in time to support their life-saving work during the pandemic.
Cheryl now shares her considerable expertise in interaction design, game development, product design, design operations, cloud services, performing arts, education, design ethics, creative leadership, and storytelling with the world via her books, articles, keynote speeches, and her design education company Ideaplatz, LLC.
Designer + author
- Author of 2 books: Design Beyond Devices and The Game Development Strategy Guide
- Creator and host of Enduring Play: A Game Development Podcast
- Frequent Medium editor’s choice, including Pretty Please, Alexa and Fail Limit Exceeded
- Published by Rosenfeld Media, Katie Couric Media, Huffington Post, and Forbes.com
- Featured profiles and interviews by Microsoft Alumni Network, El Colombiano, BBC Radio 4, Screenrant, Wired, Polygon, Carnegie Mellon University homepage, The Video Game Library
Keynote Speaker, Host + Facilitator
- TEDxSeattleWomen
- Interaction Latin America 2019
- Design Matters Tokyo 2025
- UX Scotland 2019
- Toastmaster for the 2023 Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (SFWA) Nebula Awards
Plus many more appearances in over a dozen countries worldwide, along with global public and corporate virtual workshops and keynotes.
Created and facilitates world renowned workshops including “Giving Voice to your Voice Designs” and “Multimodal Design Fundamentals.”
ACTOR + CREATOR
- Co-starred in Shadowrun: Corporate SINS on HyperRPG
(Season 1 – Season 2) - Also appeared in Leviathan: Distant Stars, Right Clique, and A Manor of Speaking for GeekSpace TV
- Created, directed, and hosted the pandemic-era livestream improv series “Cupid on Mute” (Episode 1 / Episode 2 / Episode 3 / Episode 4)
- Co-star and co-writer of MSN’s “I’d See It If” movie review mini-series, which aired to over 500,000 views
- 10 years variety streaming puppetry and video games as “FunnyGodmother” on Twitch
- 20+ years as a professional actress, improv performer, teacher, singer, dancer, director, and puppeteer
“Algorithms thrive on easily categorized content – which means our AI-powered world isn’t built to celebrate the cross-disciplinary collaboration I teach my readers, community members, and students. But human-centered design, opti-pessimistic thinking, storytelling, and shared understanding driven by deep curiosity are the keys to surviving and thriving in a world irrevocably shaped by technology, good and bad. Join me as we dare to design a better path together.”
– Cheryl Platz
Praise for the game development strategy guide
Platz treats the history of gaming with reverence, mentioning deep cuts such as MadMaze alongside indie darlings like Unpacking; this makes the guide feel truly all-encompassing—as expansive as an open-world RPG—in a way that will resonate with industry insiders, newbie developers, and curious players alike.”
Kirkus Reviews
An amazingly broad and contemporary take on our industry. Whether you are new to the gaming industry or a veteran, if there is only one book you read about the game industry and all the different points of view on it? It should probably be this one.”
Will Wright, creator of The Sims
Two books. No boundaries.
A world of design ideas.
Cheryl Platz’s work spans industries, technologies, and disciplines, making us better together so that we can make technology better for humans around the world. Whether you’re looking to make technology work for you by learning more about the intersection of humans and the next-generation devices that surround them in Design Beyond Devices or whether you’re looking to learn more about human behavior and the fastest-growing part of the entertainment sector in The Game Development Strategy Guide, Cheryl’s work is there to challenge and inspire you.
All of Cheryl’s work is written to be accessible by audiences at a wide variety of experience levels, inviting both beginners and veterans to discover new insights while showcasing a variety of diverse industry voices to expand your horizons while exploring the material.
Cheryl’s books are available via Ingram distribution to your favorite digital bookseller worldwide or for stocking at your bookstore – or purchase directly from publisher Rosenfeld Media.
Why Storytelling? Why Now?
Well, Cheryl’s been a storyteller her whole life, but she’s excited that you’re excited.
The Wall Street Journal reports that companies are desperately seeking “storytellers.” The fact is that ideas are easy – aligning a big group of people to build the same idea is the hard part, and that’s where storytelling comes in.
Cheryl is renowned for her ability to weave grounded, truthful, compelling stories that build shared understanding across cross-continental groups of stakeholders – and those stories turn into real products, like Amazon’s Echo Look and the successful launch of the Riot Games + Xbox Game Pass partnership. She can make these stories intuitive and fun to engage with because she’s trained in cognitive psychology, user research, user experience design, game design – and has decades of professional improvisational theater performance and teaching experience.
You can learn from Cheryl’s techniques today. Cheryl has been providing storytelling insights to technologists based on her career success for decades, and the answers are there in her talks, Medium posts, and books with insights like applied storyboarding, the improv framework CROW applied for better user research in her book Design Beyond Devices, her chapter on narrative design and engagement over time in her game development book The Game Development Strategy Guide, and beyond.
Latest Talk: Modern Motivators of Play
At the SLICE conference run by Seattle Indies in 2025, Cheryl was honored to debut a microtalk exploring the concept of the Motivators of Play that she introduces in her new book, The Game Development Strategy Guide. Follow along with the slides by clicking here to download the PDF.
Dive into Cheryl’s deeper design talks
You can learn much more from Cheryl’s public design talks than you ever could from a “pick your brain 1:1” – take the plunge and explore case studies and best practice highlights with Cheryl on stages around the world.
Behind #TheUnlock: Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration at Scale
From Blank Page to World Stage
(creating the echo look)
Enduring Play: A Game Development Podcast (Season 1)
Cheryl Platz created and hosts this companion podcast to the Game Development Strategy Guide which provides extended insights beyond what will fit inside the pages of the book. The podcast is crafted with context like definitions and historical details so that even those who haven’t picked up the book yet can follow along and learn from the experience. A great way to assess whether The Game Development Strategy Guide may be right for you.
Check out what hundreds have enjoyed so far with these top 3 episodes from Season 1 of the Enduring Play podcast:
From her work as UX Director at Epic Games on classics like Fortnite to her widely respected published books on the psychology of video games, UX Strategist and author Celia Hodent, PhD has helped wrangle the complexity of possibility using classic human-centered design and research psychology techniques. In this first episode of Enduring Play, Celia and Cheryl go far beyond wireframes to redefine your mental model of what the discipline of user experience can truly bring to the table for video game teams.
During the day, 3D printing influencer joemag serves as a systems designer with experience on world-renowned titles like Hearthstone and Teamfight Tactics, designing unique game mechanics while wielding the powers of math and communication using a deep foundation in competitive analysis to strike a balance between exponential and logarithmic curves in a quest for fun and engagement.
Tamara Knoss has played many roles in the video game industry: character animator, lead artist, UI artist, and now Senior Technical UI Designer. This episode reveals some of the techniques and mindsets used to solve for extreme constraint when games were shipping on cartridges no larger than 16 megabytes. That’s right. Megabytes. But there’s also plenty of modern insight about how specialization in an engine like Unity unlocks creativity in new ways.
That seems… Like an unlikely variety of things for one person.
How did Cheryl get to this point?
Xennial Forged in Technology
Cheryl learned to read early, which included all of her dad’s PC Magazines, the VCR manual, and the BASIC manual to her Commodore 64 at age 4. She went on to be one of the first Wi-Fi users at Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad. She is one of the few to see both sides of the Internet revolution, and uses this insight to her advantage.
Embracing the hyphenate life
Cheryl intentionally chose Carnegie Mellon University over other schools with more traditional curriculums because she wanted a multidisciplinary education, and pursued one of the earliest undergraduate bachelor’s degrees in human-computer interaction.
Coming of age onstage
Cheryl’s first job was in the entertainment industry as a teenage Muppet – performing as a character and character host at Sesame Place in Langhorne, PA. This experience taught her what it takes to tell stories at scale, and gave her deep reverence for the power of the world’s best IP on our youngest generations. She went on to continue her acting training as President of Scotch ‘n’ Soda Theatre at Carnegie Mellon and a member of their improv troupe the No Parking Players.
Triumph over adversity
Cheryl has lived with multiple disabilities her whole life. That learned resilience has forged her ability to transcend almost any obstacle, from documented sexual harassment to layoffs, supporting people working on the front lines of a global pandemic, and life-altering medical diagnoses like recurring ovarian tumors and Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
Fearless in the face of complexity
Cheryl’s love of complex problems drove her to the information technology sector when her advancement in video games exceeded many hiring managers’ comfort levels for a woman in the early aughts. The time she spent away from games was spent designing for the world’s largest distributed networks and cloud services, giving her unique insight into the complexities required to ship live-service apps.
life as an improv scene
Cheryl takes her improv training to heart in her approach to her professional life, following the call to adventure into uncharted territory: as the first designer on the Echo Look, as one of the early voice designers on the Alexa voice platform, as the design lead for the unprecedented Riot Games + Xbox Game Pass partnership, and as the first Principal Designer for Productivity at the Gates Foundation who played a critical role in preparing the foundation for their remote work readiness.
“Her story isn’t just about games. It’s about resilience, reinvention, and the pursuit of joy—even when life throws unexpected boss battles her way.”
Microsoft Alumni Network on Cheryl Platz’s professional journey
Upcoming Schedule
Cheryl is self-organizing the book tour for The Game Development Strategy Guide and welcomes inquiries from potential organizers at venues or universities, especially in San Francisco, London, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, or Orlando.
09
January 2026
Embrace Your Fun Factor:
Game Development Best PRactices for Product Design
11AM – 12PM ET
Free Rosenfeld Media Webinar
10
March 2026
GDC Festival of Gaming:
Spreadsheets Microtalk
3:10pm – 4:10pm
Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA