10 Women Rising in Gaming
September 2026
Zoe Ebling
Company: AGS (American Gaming Systems) — Vice President, Interactive
Years of experience in the gaming industry: 8
Hometown: Naperville, Illinois
What was your first job in the gaming industry? Did you have previous experience in other industries? What drew you to gaming?
I came to gaming sideways, and not for gaming.
My first role was in the marketing department at Design Works Gaming, a social gaming company. Before that I was in operations at a recruiting agency. What I actually wanted was to build an app. I had an idea called PaparazzMe, facial recognition that would let you find your own photos from an event instead of scrolling through thousands of them. I was deep in patent research, and I needed real experience building and shipping technology before I could take it any further. Online gaming was where I could get that experience.
The app never happened, and that technology is everywhere now, which I try not to think about too often. But I found something better than the thing I went looking for: an industry that builds product faster than almost any other and tells you immediately whether players agree with you.
What do you like about working in gaming? What is it about the industry that keeps you engaged? What is unique about it?
What I like most about gaming is how creative it is, and not only in the games themselves. Every business we work with is different, so I see an enormous range of strategies, how one operator thinks about acquisition, how another builds a content plan, what one will bet on that another will not. Much of my job is connecting those things to each other, and that is creative work, too.
It also means we are never finished. The cycles are short, and that churn is what forces new ideas out of you, you cannot repeat last year and expect it to work. Most of what we do is finding the next 1%, and then the next, and the compounding of those is what moves a business.
What keeps me engaged is that there is no single answer to why people play. What a player wants in Ontario is not what a player wants in Brazil, and the difference is cultural rather than technical. You do not learn that from a dashboard; you learn it by being there, which suits me, because I am rarely in one place for long. I am on the road constantly, with customers, scoping new markets, or working from somewhere I have not been before, and that is my favorite part of the job.
Looking ahead, what impact do you hope to make in the industry, and what would you like your leadership legacy to be?
Most of what this industry treats as impossible is simply unbuilt. That is the belief I have been working from for most of my career, and it has been right far more often than it has been wrong.
I have come to believe the same is true of people. Organizations call something impossible when it is only unfamiliar, and they call someone difficult when they are only different. I have been on both sides of that. I have built the thing people said was too hard, and I have been the person quietly asked to be a little more like everyone else.
So, the impact I want to make is to leave this industry with fewer things it believes cannot be done, and fewer people it asks to fit in. If there is a legacy, I would like it to be that the people who worked with me stopped waiting for permission – to build the thing, or to be themselves while they built it.
What personal and professional qualities or traits do you believe are essential for success in the gaming industry, and which of those qualities have helped you thrive in your own career?
I can only really speak for the online side, but what it demands above all is that you do what you said you were going to do. Everybody promises. Far fewer deliver on the date they gave. Trust is the entire currency, and it is built out of small, unglamorous, kept commitments. It also asks more of your time than people expect – long hours, flights, meetings across every time zone. And it demands that you think past the obvious, because the obvious version of any product exists.
The quality of mine that has carried me is one I had long before gaming – I cannot leave a broken process alone. At the recruiting agency, I rebuilt how applicants came in and how candidates were ranked. Waiting tables, I ended up revamping the restaurant’s marketing.
In a clothing store, I added a Pokémon Go hotspot to get more people through the door. Nobody asked me to do any of it. Do the job next to the job, that instinct has gotten me every role I have had, including this one.
The trait that makes me good at this is also the one that costs me most. I cannot accept something at 80%, and I will spend time on problems, and on people, that a more efficient version of me would walk past. It is a large part of why we deliver what we said we would. It is also what I am still learning to manage.
The last is translation. Most of my week sits between people who understand online deeply and people who do not yet and bringing them along is most of the job. I used to think of that as the tedious part. Now I think it is the part I am actually paid for.
What advice do you have for women seeking careers in gaming?
I am usually one of the few women in the room, and I get underestimated constantly. It is almost never hostile – it is simply assumed. I am tattooed, I dress casually, and I am young, so I get read as junior. At trade shows, people routinely ask the man standing beside me whether he runs Interactive.
And when I am on a stage, the comment I get coming off is usually about my outfit. The men who come off the same stage get comments that their point was a good one. I put an enormous amount of work into what I say. We comment on how a woman looks before we ever engage with what she says, and it is not only at conferences. It happens in much smaller rooms, too.
That is the version you get from strangers. The version that actually changed me came from someone whose opinion I cared about. Early in a new job, I was told that people were finding me difficult to work with. I was operating differently and holding people to what I needed, and that was not popular. The suggestion was that I spend more time with them. The intent was never that I should change who I was — but that is what I heard, and I spent a long time afterwards performing rather than being useful.
My uncle coaches basketball. Someone once asked him the difference between coaching men and coaching women. He said that if you tell a men’s team at halftime they need to pass more, not one of them thinks you mean him. Say the identical thing to a women’s team and every player assumes you mean her. That has stayed with me, because it is exactly what happened to me.
So, my advice runs both ways. If you manage women in gaming, weigh how your feedback will land and not only whether it is accurate, because the same sentence does not land the same way. If you are the woman receiving it, keep what makes you sharper and put down what only makes you smaller. And show up as yourself – the thing that makes you different is usually the reason you were invited into the room in the first place.
