Belinda M. Van Sickle

Belinda Van Sickle is President/CEO of GameDocs, a game industry service provider specializing in distribution, consulting, packaging, localizations, web promotion and B-to-B documents. She started her video game career in 1996 at Activision, working as a writer, copyeditor, designer and layout artist in charge of all game manual copy.

In 1999, she was one of the founding members of Ignited Minds, an ad agency that specialized in game packaging. At ATVI and IM, Belinda worked on manuals for all of Activision's releases from 1997 through 2005. She left IM in 2005 to start her own company. GameDocs has since worked on packaging and promo materials for Blizzard, Vivendi, Disney Interactive Studios, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Konami, Midway and many other triple A and independent publishers.

Belinda started volunteering for Women in Games International in 2006 by spearheading the WIGI Linkedin group and the Community Mixer series. Since then, she has become CEO of the organization, leading WIGI's efforts to promote and encourage women's achievement in video games. Belinda has an undergraduate degree in Feminist Studies and Psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Master's in English with a focus in Creative Writing from Sonoma State University.

She has spoken at industry conferences such as GDC, Casual Connect, NAB and others. Belinda has been interviewed for several articles on the game industry for publications like Wired, GameSpot, GameCareerGuide, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Into Tomorrow podcast. She has lectured or taught at the University of Southern California, California State University-Fullerton, the Art Institute of California-Los Angeles and Westwood College.

She's been a hardcore casual gamer for more than 15 years and loves hidden object games on the Macintosh. http://www.gamedocs.com/blog/wordpress/?cat=3