Xbox Football Season Begins

Getting a group of surly, 250-pound football players to jump on demand has become a routine part of the workday for Kathy O'Keefe. She and a team of 40 other computer-graphics experts have developed NFL Fever 2002 for Microsoft's Xbox video-gaming platform.

O'Keefe, a 3-D artist and modeler for Microsoft Games Studio, did not foresee a future in sports games. While working on the design for an articulating lamp, however, she became interested in how flexibility could be translated to the computer screen. "I remember looking at my wrist and being amazed at how it could move," says O'Keefe. "Creating this game required that we first build a new race of men that moved in a realistic way in a virtual world that is based on a real-life paradigm, where there are rules you cannot break."