Gisela Vaquero: "Video games were a way out of bullying."

Gisela Vaquero (Besalú, 1984) is a video game designer, producer, and content creator. She is the founder of Jellyworld Games and the Women in Games association, which supports female video game developers.

She attended the Salvador Vilarrasa School in Besalú. "It was right next to my house, but I often woke up to the music already playing, signaling everyone was leaving, and I was always the last to arrive," she says. She was a very introverted child, "very quiet and calm." "My parents weren't around much. A relative looked after me; I used to call her." Uncle Botey, and he taught me the alphabet before I could even walk. We had a table with painted games, goose, checkers, chess, and he taught me how to play. And that stuck," she adds.

Board games are similar to video games. "The mechanics, many of them, are the same. At home, the tiles had different shapes and figures, and I made up ideas that each room had to do something, a different game in each room. I didn't have many people to play with. I had a pretty lonely childhood," she explains. She has a sister who was eight years older and "wasn't home much. The age difference was very noticeable," she adds.

Video games entered the house when she was little: "My father had a computer, and when he was away, I took advantage of the opportunity to play with software programs and video games. When I was five or six, I played a title-making program called Banner Mania.

I also had consoles: the Master System 2 and later the Game Gear. "I would sit on the floor and spend hours playing Columns, the Mickey Mouse game... And on the weekends, when I was about 8 years old, we would both play Super Mario," she says.

My father was a salesman and my mother worked in the family clothing store. When Gisela was little, when people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would say a detective. She wanted to investigate. "Later, I realized that I didn't want to be the one who solved cases. I started writing very early, at 7," she recalls. And she has a box full of newspapers from when she was little.

Change of city and school

When she was 12, she moved to Olot and studied at the IES La Garrotxa. "My parents separated and my mother was already working in a nursing home in Olot. The change was very drastic. I used to be much thinner and I started to become obese and suffer a lot from it." bullying. Video games were an escape route from bullying", he admits.

His performance at school dropped: "I suffered so much from bullying "All my grades dropped. I went from being good and excellent to being good. In this school, they separated the smart from the not-so-smart. And from class A, I went to class B. And the teachers told me I wasn't cut out to go to university."

But she continued studying. "I really like learning. The thing is, sometimes the education system doesn't anticipate that some people can't study at certain times, which is why they get bullied. The teachers didn't do anything, and they knew it. I remember a math class, with all the girls bullying me. bullying behind me, throwing things at me, while the teacher looked on and said nothing. They didn't know what to do then," she explains.

She completed her artistic baccalaureate. "I really liked art. The only drawback was that there was no math," she says. She went to university, in Girona, to study advertising and public relations. "Imagine a very shy person with very open people; I felt out of place, but it was a good environment that helped me learn to communicate," she explains.

She went on to study audiovisual communication in Barcelona: "I liked it more. And I started to take an interest in creating video games. And when I finished, I did a master's degree in Video Game Design and Programming at the Polytechnic, where I was the only woman in a class of 70 students."