Suzanne Johnson, a story lead for Pocket Gems’ Episode Interactive mobile gaming app, spoke to students about her career at 3 p.m on Oct. 10. in the Marano Campus Center Auditorium.

Johnson is one of the many speakers traveling to Oswego State from around the country to speak as part of the Living Writers Series. Johnson first started at the University of California as an aquatic biology major.

“About halfway through my junior year I realized there was no way I wanted to be out on a tuna boat looking at the sex life of sand crabs,” Johnson said. “I added on a communications studies major in film and television so I could get going in the right direction.”

After graduating from the University of California, Johnson went to New York University film school and wanted to be a screen writer or director.

“Once I got there and started directing films, I realized more than anything I really wanted to be a screen writer,” Johnson said. “It was much more appealing to me to be at home sitting in my bathrobe writing with a cat on my lap than out on a set directing a film.”

Right out of college, Johnson got a job working with a small independent film production company that was producing a documentary on Mother Teresa. Johnson said she enjoyed working there because she was able to meet and work with Mother Teresa for a couple years during the production.

After the documentary, Johnson worked her way up from an assistant to the vice president of programming and talent development for ABC Daytime for almost 20 years.

She wrote for the show “All My Children” and oversaw the program “One Life to Live.” When Disney canceled the shows in 2011, Hulu picked up “All My Children” soon after and Johnson began writing the script for it.

“When the soaps were canceled, I was more than anything just sad because it is something that I grew up watching,” Johnson said. “So for me it was not only my career but it was something that meant a lot to me. Now I look on it and I think ‘Oh my god I could not have been happier.’ It totally was a blessing in disguise.”

Johnson then worked for Nickelodeon as a story consultant. While working at Nickelodeon, she began consulting for a company called Pocket Gems, a mobile gaming app company in San Francisco. In March, she was offered a full-time position.

“We are a very strong, quickly growing company,” Johnson said. “I’ve only been working there full-time since March and in that time we’ve brought on about 50 new employees. We are growing rapidly and since 2009 the company has moved five times because we don’t have enough room for people.”

Johnson currently works on the game called “Episode,” a mobile gaming app developed by Pocket Gems and has been downloaded more than 200 million times. Through “Episode,” the player can create and make choices for a character.

“Episode” licensed the movie “Mean Girls” and musician Demi Lovato to tell their stories through the app. They take those characters and create new stories for them. “Episode” also creates new story ideas and has a large amount of user content.

“We combined [novels and movies] and we’ve got this physically compelling bite size thing that you can watch at your own pace,” Johnson said. “If you want to watch it for three minutes you can or if you’re standing in line somewhere and you want to sit down and watch it for an hour you can. But you can get good stories and fun things in just a few minutes if you want.”

Ryan Cobane, an Oswego State sophomore, said he enjoyed listening to Johnson discuss the path she took before ending up at Pocket Gems.

“It was nice to hear her talk about how she at first she didn’t want to be a writer,” Cobane said. “Although being an aquatic biologist would have been cool, she ended up doing what she really wanted to do.”