Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The 100 Most Influential Women in Gaming

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the clearing-things-up dept.

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.'"

9 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Top 10 maybe by dalewj · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Top 10 makes sense, top 100 is a bit of digging for no reason... in my opinion. intersting thou.

    1. Re:Top 10 maybe by jeffmeden · · Score: 3, Insightful

      +1. Project managers? Consultants? It sounds like they struggled just to find 100 women with careers related to video games. Influential, to me, means that the person has a broad impact on the industry in general and not just on the project they work on. I doubt many these people could be named by anyone outside their company. The pics are suspect too, how many do you think came off of their MySpace page? It's not that I'm harsh on women in gaming, but the author probably just did this as a favor piece so that she can make 100 friends in the business.

  2. missing: the one who is not only most important... by jimstapleton · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    34486853790
    Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
  3. Roberta Williams? by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And besides that, wtf would influential in gaming mean? Every part considering gaming? In that case Hillary Cliton should also be on that list.

    1. Re:Roberta Williams? by spyrochaete · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The omission of Roberta Williams is ridiculous. She is one of the most influential people in the history of games, never mind video games, never mind women.

  4. Click print to see them all... by hansamurai · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:missing: the one who is not only most important by ElleyKitten · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Yeah, I'm sure no one every did that before her, because it's *so* fucking hard to swap out bytecode for partial words and tell the compiler to convert.
    [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]

    Troll.
    --
    "What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
  6. Re:missing: the one who is not only most important by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, I'm sure no one every did that before her, because it's *so* fucking hard to swap out bytecode for partial words and tell the compiler to convert.

    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.
  7. I think I've figured it out by Pluvius · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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