“I’m gonna make games,” Ellie Freeman declared at age 9.
That was six years ago. Now a 15-year-old freshman at the Kehillah School, a private Jewish high school in Palo Alto, Freeman has a video game in professional development.
“I’ve been playing video games since I could first use an iPad,” she said. She lives in Los Altos with her family, who are members of Congregation Beth Am. “When I was 7, I started playing Minecraft, and during the pandemic lockdown, I played every day. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a game designer.”
In July 2022, she pursued her dream by attending a three-week online day camp through Girls Make Games, an organization that supports girls ages 8 to 18 who want to pursue careers in the video game industry.
Women make up more than 45% of the gaming population but less than 24% of the video game industry, according to the organization. The documentary “Girls Level Up” profiles the camp experience as a way to address that gender disparity in the field.
Since Girls Make Games was launched in 2014, more than 8,000 girls have participated in its workshops and camps, and 27,000 have used its tutorials, games and resources, according to the organization’s website. It offers three-week summer camps at multiple locations across the country and virtual programs open to participants worldwide.
Freeman has attended the summer camp in San Mateo for the last few years, expanding her skills in coding and developing art and audio. Three years ago, she helped develop a game that won a prize in the camp’s junior bracket. Last summer, her team created a prototype for a game called “Paper Trail.”
“The premise is that a kid in the hospital with a broken right arm starts drawing with the other arm, and the drawings come to life and turn into monsters,” she said. “We wanted a horror game, but we didn’t want it to be really creepy or scary, so the monsters are evil, giant broccoli, an evil smiley face, an evil flower and an evil blob. Players race from room to room, solving puzzles to escape.”
“Paper Trail” won the camp’s grand prize.
“We hadn’t set our hopes very high, because the teen bracket was hard, and we didn’t expect to get to the finals,” she said. “And then we won!”
Girls Make Games pays for the professional development process and will publish the completed game on Steam, a digital distribution platform for gaming, and on PlayStation consoles. Proceeds will go to the Girls Make Games college scholarship fund.
Freeman and her three teammates are busy polishing their winning game.
“We’ve had a couple of meetings to finalize what we want the [professional] developers to do next,” she said. “Later, we’ll see prototypes that we can approve or ask for more changes.”
In December, when the 2025 Game Awards — something like the Oscars of video games — honored Girls Make Games with the Game Changer Award in Los Angeles, Freeman was one of two girls chosen to accept the trophy.
She has already registered for Girls Make Games camp this summer and recruited some friends to join her.
“I’m always excited to go to camp, and then camp makes me more excited to make games — it’s a circle,” she said. “Besides, it’s nice to be around other girls who have the same passion.”