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The 100 Most Influential Women in Gaming
Ground Glass writes "Next Generation has posted a list of the 100 most influential women in the games industry. It's an exhaustive and nonsense-free take on a subject particularly important to the male-dominated world of videogames. From the article: 'A gender-inclusive approach to game design and marketing of games may ensure that most, if not all, considerations to producing games for myriad markets are not overlooked. Games are no longer produced for a niche market of players; they are produced for complex, over-lapping layers of demographically, geographically, socially and culturally-influenced consumer groups.'"
My mother's missing. As the one who decided which games got purchased, she was definately one of the top women who affected the games industry.
Sorry, I misread this article title. I was at first stunned they found 100, cause I can only think of like 2 or 3 women in gambling right now, including Jennifer Harman and Dave Williams mom.
The missus. Her stern insistence and, as a last resort, use of the step-ladder to reach the fuse-box is the only reason I still have a life, job, pulse etc when faced with [insert game].
Meta will eat itself
oh... you meant *real* women...
Top 10 makes sense, top 100 is a bit of digging for no reason... in my opinion. intersting thou.
Kudos to Fiona Cherbak, who wrote the article. I'm still reading it, but I've learned a few interesting things so far. I'll mention Sue Bohle, who has worked on PR for two decades, 3DO included.
Or, can dead people not be considered to be "influential"?
8 /bunten/index.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/03/1
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
That John Romero chick is HOT
Where's Lara Croft? She has to be in the top 100! She is a real person, isn't she?
Surprised I didn't see my girlfriend on the list, as she is definitely the one who influences how much time I can spend playing video games. :(
Lara Craft didn't make it? whaaa?
to gaming but computer science in general. I didn't see her in there. If I remember correclty, she was a US Naval Officer, and won a bet by doing the "impossible", designing a language that could use semi human words, instead of the bytecode that everyone had punched in up until then. She even made it work in three languages... Without her, the whole computer industry, let alone gaming, would have been set back years.
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There are 100 women in gaming?
*ducks*
And besides that, wtf would influential in gaming mean? Every part considering gaming? In that case Hillary Cliton should also be on that list.
Lara Croft appears *nowhere* in the top 100.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Call me crazy, but they must be having a hard time finding candidates when they start listing Sales and Marketing directors on their list.
It's also funny to see [insert name here] owns a large portion of [company X] which happened to buy [game company Y].
Personally, I was expecting to see Gaile Gray on the list.
I'd like to see a list of the top 100 most influential women in the garbage industry. It's been dominated by men for some reason, and I think women named Fiona need to start getting women more involved in the garbage removal industry.
Sounds like you meant (but didn't name) Grace Hopper, who (IIRC) was associated with the development of ADA.
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html
They left out Morgan Webb? I can't believe it.
:) She made the list.
On a purely gratuitous note: Morgan Romine of Frag Dolls is just scorching
"Piter, too, is dead."
I believe you mean Grace Hopper.
Click print to view them all in one page. But seriously, where's Roberta Williams? Sure she's been retired from gaming for a few years, but she paved the way for women in the industry.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Interesting, but I think they were really reaching for a number of these. I'd much rather see a list of the most signifigant women in gaming, past and present. I think they'd find a number of more signifigant women to talk about if they delved into the past, including Roberta Williams.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So if it's exhaustive, then there can't be a 101th member. Of course, it reads more like 'these are females that I know currently in the industry, or peripherally related'. Hell, Ada Byron probably had more influence than any of the ones on the list, even if it was indirect.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I must say that I have met less than 5 true female hardcore gamers(*)
It's interesting to see that there are that many "influential" females in the industry.
(*) Again, I don't play online, maybe going and playing the Sims may help.
What, no Mynx? Dear Mynx was the one reason I kept going back to planetquake...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
But Jessica Mulligan looks more like a man than a woman.
She's about 5 or 6 pages in. Can't miss her!
Jack Thompson is technically not a woman, but I hear he's a total twat.
Troll.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
I only read the comments on this story to see how quickly somebody would post that very message. Cheers!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Last time I read about women in gaming, years ago, it was all about a handful of "ubercute" gamer "babes" and of course Asia Carrera. Now the list starts out with women CEOs. Good stuff, now we're seeing some progress toward balance.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Influence is respect, and it comes from doing something cool, then going to talk about it at GDC or publishing articles and helping the gaming community. Go find the women making accomplishments, and make a list of them, not the schedulers and signers of checks.
If lists such as this give you a hard on, why not just list the top 100 influential *people* in the gaming industry? Why bother segretating the sexes via list?
I thought we stopped doing that in junior school dodgeball teams.
But didn't Dani do most of her influential work back when s/he was Daniel? That could be a technical disqualifier. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bunten
--
Carnage Blender : Meet interesting people. Kill them.
aye (to you and the others), I'm pretty sure that's her.
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Wait for it ... wait for it ...
Not only could they find 100 women in gaming, at any capacity, but they found 100 that are influential?
I'm actually astonished.
Not that I think that's a good thing-- I just think finding 100 *people* that are actually influential is astounding considering most gamers can't name more than 5 "celebrity" gaming figures, be it male or female. Granted, this is harldy the only test for "influence," but it's certainly not far fetched to think they are, perhaps, digging a bit deep to find 100 of only one (minority) gender.
Here's to hoping things change!
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
[sarcasm]Yeah, because everyone's been writing programming languages for like 8 billion years, so someone in the '50s wouldn't have anything new to think up.[/sarcasm]
...
Good point. I shouldn't have assumed that the typical programmer is capable of thinking up a simple one-to-one swapout algorithm if someone hadn't thought of it before. Come to think of it, that's probably why most bogus patents are granted in software:
Patent Examiner(PE): Hm... okay, it looks like they're trying to patent one-click shopping. No good. That's obvious.
Patent Examiner Assistant(PEA): But sir, is that obvious to someone competent in the art?
PE: I think so
PEA: That means, obvious to a programmer.
PE: Oh! Good point! Application granted!
I'll miss the karma, but it had to be said.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Just because something *seems* obvious to you, doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone.
That is especially true when you considered; you were set up in an environment where such was pervasive, and for them it was unheard of.
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You do realize that when Admiral Hopper was assigned to work on the first computers the US had (and I do literally mean first) there was no history to precede what she ended up working on, don't you??
She worked on many pioneering projects, and I believe can be credited (blamed?) with the invention of COBOL to simplify things.
Insinuating that the work Grace Hopper did wasn't the work of Genius is kind of like saying that "All Donald Knuth did was to write down some algorithms in a book", because it's largely on the same level of achievement. Failure to recognize that shows more of your ignornance than any deficiencies in her many accomplishments.
She is as an important figure in the history of computers as practically anyone else. Sure, in retrospect, it all seems obvious. Rest assured, when she did it, it was anything but old hat or easy to do.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's not a woman, that's a MAN, baby!!!
Airplanes would have been invented without the Wright brothers, but people start talking about them, do you get all huffy and say that anyone could have put together a piece of shit plane like they did?
And your patent argument is totally off-topic (though it does help to clarify why you're so bitter). First of all, one-click shopping is obvious to a shopper (who doesn't want less clicks?). Second of all, while I think she deserves props and is an important person in the history of technology, it's not like I was saying she should have had a patent on that so no one else could make a programming language that uses English words (I don't support software patents in general), and no one else did either.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
OK, you are making an assumption: that people in the earliest days of computer program were even remotely would consider to be "typical programmers".
That couldn't be farther from the truth.
The concept of a steam engine seems fairly obvious now, pressure from the steam makes stuff move, easy. Go back a few hundred years, and tell someone with much less technical experience than the average person today has, and they'll give you a funny look.
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Honesting, ANY designer should be on the list over a "Director of Human Resources" or "Marketing Director" or many of the other titles of the people on the list, and Roberta Williams was hugely influential, and Jane Jensen has gotten tons of praise for her work with Gabriel Knight...
Ah, but therein lies the rub. At the time she was doing many of these things, there were practically no competent practitioners of the art. And nothing was obvious to anybody. Period.
She was one of the very first people to ever work on computers.
Not to over-inflate her importance, but you're kind of saying "Well, Newtonian physics is obvious to any first year physics student". The old adage in science is "I see far because I stand on the shoulders of giants"; of which she surely is one of them. That doesn't make identifying them trivial. It means they were that friggin' important.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I don't think he should be on the list. He is neither influential in any fasion, nor a woman. He just got a "chop my cock off" operation and takes hormones.
Sally Bevilacqua - for bring in bagels for the whole dev team on the 1st Monday of every month. Thanks Sally! You're a peach!
After meditating on it for a bit, I realized that the woman who wrote this list used the word "influential" when she meant to use the word "powerful." It makes a whole lot more sense now.
Rob
strike "most influential" and it actually makes sense.
She's the one on the right. I kid you not. Bow-chicka-bow-ow! Ms. Williams? I'm here to fix your hot tub. Uh oh, looks like I'm gonna hafta lay some new pipe!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
CEOs, Project managers, the list goes on. How are they influencial? Answer... "we couldn't find 100 women"
.biz site ... giving more credit to the "industry" or business sites must overinflate the value of useless management.
There's a lot of women in the industry, they just haven't been in the industry for as long as others, or others have not done as much in the current years. Roberta Williams for one hasn't had a game to my knowledge for years.
I can live with Clans, programmers, and producers (I'll even go with project managers) But why is CEos there, and why are they talking about companies who write Game guides? Neither really influences the industry, most or just figureheads. What really matters is owners and presidents as well as designers and producers. But of course this is written by a
"thou" is a (mostly unused except by some quakers) expression for other people. You wanted "though". If you are going to use "thou" then you better be talking all old english.
I have a little bit of knowledge about how this list was compiled. Fiona was originally going to publish only 50 names, but received so many recommendations that she expanded the list to 100. These women were almost entirely recommended by people outside of their companies. Many of the people who made recommendations were people (of both sexes) on the IGDA's women_dev list. There were many recommendations who didn't even make it onto the list (I recommended Evelyn Richardson, head of the Game Developer's Assocation of Australia, for example).
On the other hand, I don't think I could name that many influential males either. Carmack and Romero? Richard Garriot? Tim Sweeney? There just aren't that many star individuals.
aka John Romero's Ex-Wife.
She was hot, a level designer, a great gamer and was featured in Playboy.
See if you your name your article GAME INDUSTRY'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL WOMEN and then fill it with VPs of Marketing and your own boss (I regularly find myself contemplating this months rolling deadline and thinking "This is rough, thank god Mary Margaret Walker, CEO of recruitment agent Mary-Margaret.com is on the case.") you're just aiming to embarrass yourself to the Industry and its customers.
But, on the other hand, that's not really your audience is it?
Cosmetically, this is the best content linked from /. in a loooooong time. Don't give me MacBook.
this chick
Stevie Case Of Ion Storm/MonkeyStone and Roberta Williams of the King's Quest fame - after looking at the list twice and not either of them - worthless list without either of these two