Name: Patricia Pizer
Species: Human (Homo sapiens)
Title: Director of Games Research & Fun
Instagram: @realgamerred
Email: ppizer at parrotconcepts.com

An Infocom alum and 35+ year veteran of the games industry, Patricia mentored under Steve Meretzky. She’s worked at such studios as Boffo Games, THQ, Harmonix Music, Disney, Turbine Entertainment, 42 Entertainment, and Ubisoft. Over the course of her career, she has worked on virtually every type of game out there, from text adventures to Massively Multiplayer games; Alternate Reality to Social Networks. Puzzles to wiring robots.

Thanks to her avian companion of 30 years (Buster Keaton), she turned her game design knowledge into a drive to create game experiences to engage and entertain him and other captive parrots. The creation of Parrot Concepts is the fruition of that work, developing tablet-based video games for parrots. Pizer is also Professor of Practice in the Game Design program at Indiana University, Bloomington. Mostly though, she just likes to play games.

Specialties: Game design, storytelling, leadership, team building, exploring and utilizing new technology to create the most immersive game experiences.

Name: Virginia Wright
Species: Human (Homo sapiens)
Title: Director of Art & Technology
Instagram: @parrotconcepts
Email: vwright at parrotconcepts.com

Virginia Wright has a Bachelor’s degree in music, with professional experience in online and print design, IT/systems administration, and arts/nonprofit management and administration. She has passions for visual and performing arts, worldwide tea cultures, animal intelligence and welfare, and social equity and justice. She has built a number of websites and contributed articles and essays for publication, both online an in print on a range of topics, including arts, culture, and heritage.

She worked for several years as a graphic artist and pre-press designer. The technical side of this work led to her career shift into systems administration. Her technical background, in combination with her experience in management and leadership in volunteer positions at several arts nonprofits, all contributes to professional experience as a manager and administrator in the arts and culture sector.

She was inspired to work on developing video games for parrots as she became more aware of how smart and curious parrots are. Observing how effortlessly her Goffin's Cockatoo could interact directly with technology, she began to envision how products could be developed to provide Peach and other parrots with stimulating new forms of enrichment.

Specialties: website development, systems administration, graphic design, management, development and fundraising, strategic planning, writing, marketing and communication.

Name: Buster Keaton
Title: QA Lead
Species: Goffin's Cockatoo (Cacatua goffiniana)
Title: Quality Assurance Lead

Buster Keaton was hatched in 1994. Named after the silent film star because he does his own stunts & Patricia loves films, his nicknames are: Tookie (after the bird in George of the Jungle cartoons), TookieToo, BBird, Monster, “pain in the butt.” His favorite human food is whatever Patricia is eating. His biggest fear is stuffed animals & whatever he suddenly decides is terrifying. He loves shooting chips of wood at Patricia when she’s driving, and he occasionally talks in his sleep. His favorite thing to do? Chew. Anything. Everything. He likes showing off too.

Name: Peach
Title: QA Lead
Species: Goffin's Cockatoo (Cacatua goffiniana)
Title: Quality Assurance Lead
Instagram: @dailycockatoo

Peach was hatched between 1981-1985. She came to live with Virginia in February of 2020, after spending five years in her first home, thirty years in another household, and more than two years in a pet store. She is very intelligent and curious, and does an excellent job product testing our apps. She was able to figure out how to interact with an electronic tablet easily.

Peach does not make any non cockatoo sounds, and has never exhibited interest in imitating human speech or any other sounds. The Daily Cockatoo website and Instagram account have a lot of information on what her life is like.

Name: BB
Title: Game Tester
Species: Lesser Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo (Cacatua sulphurea)
Instagram: @dailycockatoo

BB was hatched in 1990 in California. He has been with Virginia since 2023 and is generally much more interested in biting phones and tablets than playing games with them. He has an interesting history.

BB says a few human words. "Baby Bird," his original name, is the thing he says most clearly and often, and he has a very sweet high pitched singing/whistling voice. There is more info on him on the Instagram account DailyCockatoo.

Name: Vogue
Title: Game Tester
Species: Ducorps Cockatoo (Cacatua ducorpsii)
Instagram: @dailycockatoo

Vogue was hatched in 2003. He came to stay with Virginia when his previous owner needed him to have a safe place to land before they moved out of the area. He's a little bit ragged due to a number of factors in the first twenty years of his life, but he's a happy and playful cockatoo. He's not very good at his job with Parrot Concepts because he prefers trying to hump phones and tablets instead of interacting with the games and apps. He's in a worker retraining program to try to overcome that.

He makes a lot of strange babbling noises and often asks, "what are you doing?"