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The Time for Women in Games
VeeCee writes "Next Generation has an interesting article on why few women are game developers, why it should change, and how." From the article: "Fulton then cited workforce statistics, showing that in 1950, 30 percent of women worked, compared with 70 percent six years ago. 'We're rapidly becoming equal players in the larger workforce. More women are playing games.' Citing a study that showed women outnumbered men as players in the 24 to 35 year-old demographic, Fulton granted that casual games were a factor. 'However I think there's an appetite there. As we get online, as the games start getting more interactive, more social, women are getting more and more interested in what it means to play games.'"
I wonder what could possibly be keeping women from the mainstream gaming market.
I think in more developed countries, game-playing women are perceived as nerds, hence reducing their chances of finding mates.
In less developed countries, game-playing women are perceived as lazy, hence reducing their chances of finding mates.
Honestly, I'm surprised Ms Fulton titled her keynote "The Best Defense... Why Gender Doesn't Matter (As Much As You Might Think)". If gender really doesn't matter, then why would the general public care of 10% or 99% of the game developers are female?
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
I should know. I'm sitting in an office full of men. The only women we've hired were for Sales & Marketing, booth babes, etc. Haha, reminds me of when college recruiters came to my all-boys high school and didn't know it was single-sex. "Oh, it's only guys here. Great! You'll feel just at home in our CompSci classes." It was right then and there I decided not to major in I.T.
The time is finally right for a female-centric game company. Don't know who Brenda Laurel is? You should. The woman is a freakin' genius and a pioneer in the field of human-computer interaction.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That statistic is BS. Sure, I watch girls play games all the time. They play Sudoku, Solitare, FreeCell. They like puzzle games, and that's cool. But it's almost always going to be on a casual basis.
Being casual does not make you that bothered. I ride bicycles, but I don't want to be a bicycle engineer. I would even say I love cars, but I don't care about their engines past how loud they are and how fast they can go. That's a casual relationship too.
Why would girls who play Sudoku care in any way shape or form about programming Sudoku games?
We can run around these circles all day about why girls play games or why they don't, why they program or why they don't, but the end result is the same. Unless someone can fundamentally change the nature of programming, or indeed, development, they aren't going to do it.
I have stopped caring about how many girls play games or how many girls develop games. It's not a big deal.
I wonder why we never hear people complaing that women are not 50% of the criminal "workforce".
From the UK: "Men outnumber women in all major crime categories. Between 85 and 95 per cent of offenders found guilty of burglary, robbery, drug offences, criminal damage or violence against the person are male. Although the number of offenders are relatively small, 98 per cent of people found guilty of, or cautioned for, sexual offences are male"
Or how about garbagemen (garbagepeople) or coal miners? Why are people never concerned about women not making headways there?
Riddle me that, Batman.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
My one question is this: why is it always an assumed premise that if there's a statistic in which girls or boys are over-represented:
1. it's automatially a bad thing
2. it's automatically a bad thing for girls
Not true. Nobody seems to be concerned that men outnumber women in suicides (in developed countries, with the exception of Chine -- if you count them as developed), or that men outnumber women as drug users, or that most of the people in jail are men, or that most garbagemen (garbagepeople, sorry) are men, or that most coal miners (or any other crap job) are men. If only there was some sort of conclusion we could draw from all of this...
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
I work for a rather large software company, and I am one of the many engineers. In the 6 years I have worked here I have worked with a total of 3 women. Most of them were VERY competent programmers. In contrast I cannot count how many men I have worked with, sure enough the number would be in the hundreds.
Back in college (6 years ago), we had similar ratios in all the CS classes, and even in the upper division physics classes. However, my upper division social classes were DOMINATED by women.
I don't want to sound sexist or mysognistic, but I don't think we need more women in engineering any more than we need more male social workers. I think we need more people doing exactly what they want to do; if that fits a pattern, so be it; just as long as we don't restrict people from being in any profession.
McD
People who are against human cloning must be bitter they are not good enough to be cloned.
"Lara, you're going to have to swim through this shark infested water to get to the next ruin."
"I certainly hope not. Blood attracts sharks quicker than anything else."
"My god, you're injured? Don't you have any medical kits l-- oh."
<icily>"Quite."
I know a lot of female gamers, but maybe that's because I am one. Programmer, too. But I'm a slight anomoly - most of the women gamers I know are tabletop gamers, while I play both, in nearly even amounts. So for players, I can buy the viewpoint that far too many games drive away women with big boobs and scanty costumes. Female armor in most MMORPGs, for example, tends to get a lot of jokes, just like really bad fantasy novel covers.
Regarding women as programmers, I think that there are two things to consider:
a) programmers are geeky and particularly at the moment, teenagers frown on people being smart, as the opposite of cool. Women tend to be more socially aware (or socially malleable) than their male counterparts in high school, so while they may quietly get good grades, they probably won't choose a geeky path like CS in college.
b) there are still, believe it or not, teachers who discourage women from fields related to math or science. I was lucky enough not to have that problem in high school (now a fading ten years in the past), but I have heard plenty of first hand stories on the subject.
The mainstream games industry sucks. What sane person would want to be trapped in there?
:)
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So girls aren't keen to join? That's probably because they have too much SENSE to join the world of perpetual crunch time and all the other misery we always hear about.
Girls who love mainstream games are perfectly capable of getting in there themselves. There's no point in trying to force others into it. I'm a female game designer and programmer and I would be thoroughly MISERABLE if you tried to hire me to work on your FPS.
The problem comes earlier, really. The problem, as I see it, lies in schools and preconceptions. I've been in plenty of places with girl gamers who think games are cool - but have been conditioned to believe that programming is really hard and impossible to understand and they couldn't possibly do it, so they will never try. Even though there are tons of tools out there to make programming easier and help newbies make at least small, crap games with very little experience necessary. The girls are too convinced that programming is beyond them to even LOOK for tools. So they just sit around and talk about games that "it would be cool if someone made" rather than doing anything about it themselves.
Do any high schools bother teaching simple interactive creation tools like Flash? Show more little girls that they can MAKE something cool if they just TRY and a couple more of them might come and join me.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!