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In UK Study, Girls Best Boys At Making Computer Games
New submitter Esteanil writes Researchers in the University of Sussex's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language. The young people, aged 12-13, spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role-playing games.
The girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding.
The girls used seven different triggers – almost twice as many as the boys – and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses.
Boys nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.
I'm guessing they had things like...
Trigger
Character says "Xxxxx".
Character attacks.
Character is damaged.
Character places objects on table.
Character gives objects to NPC.
Character is hungry.
Character is wielding X when close to a spot.
For some reason, the boys only used the 1st trigger and the result was a stereotypical "prompt/respond" roleplaying game.
Using the other triggers would provide a less stereotypical experience.
Not sure why all the girls did well and all the boys did badly. That seems off.
Perhaps there was a particular girl who "got it" and showed the other girls how to use the other triggers or shared code and made it easier for them to figure it out. Perhaps the teacher prompted the girls in some way.
In any case, the girls did better in this case-- perhaps some will turn out to be major names and the experience has to bolster their confidence.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Varies by engine, but a lot of game logic these days is specified via visual programming languages, especially at big "AAA" game companies. The engine itself and the graphics/rendering parts, along with some computationally sensitive AI bits, will be written in C++, but a lot of the actual gameplay-relevant logic and events are scripted using something like Kismet (UDK3) or Blueprints (UDK4). Partly this is because in big companies, game logic has moved more and more towards becoming the responsibility of the level and character designers, while the "programmers" have become more specialized engine/graphics coders who don't actually program anything to do with gameplay.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Article by By Rhiannon Williams (fem).
Research by Dr Kate Howland (fem) and Dr Judith Good (fem)!
Can you smell the biasness and bullcrap from where you are? I rest my case. We will need a new study.
Fortunately my university provides me with access to the original study, so for those who are interested:
The study was performed on three elementary school classes with a total of 55 students (29 girls, 26 boys). Despite the small sample size, they did perform a statistical analysis and found the results to be significant (p < 0.001), the results being that girls on average scored higher on a computational thinking test before and after the course. The differences in improvement between genders was not significant and it is worth noting that despite having lower average scores before and after the course, the range of scores for boys in post-testing extended higher and lower than those of girls. I wish I could link the boxplot for the data but I'm not sure that's legal.
It is also important to note that the study was not performed in order to measure the difference between boys and girls in programming, but to measure the benefits of using their special programming software over an eight-week course. The software itself is indeed very visual, and the 'programming' is done by dragging around boxes with partial statements and filling in the blanks with object boxes. The software then constructs a text interpretation of the code in a lower box, which is what the computational thinking problems related to.
Timmyboy is only known for his village idiocy of spreading FUD. This article is nothing else.
Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.
Anecdote: When I introduced RPG Maker in an after-school program at the urging of one boy, more girls than boys asked if they could also participate. The girls also stuck with it longer than every boy, save the original. (The girls averaged about three weeks vs the boys four days, not counting the first boy, who spent 4 months on his creation.)
Children, regardless of gender, enjoy creative activities. Moving on...
The only female writers in games I can name off the top of my head
You'd be amazed at how many games were written and designed by women, even in the old days. Sticking with just well-known titles: River Raid (Carol Shaw), Centipede (Dona Bailey, later driven from the industry by male co-workers), Archon (Anne Westfall), [bunch of Sierra games] (Jane Jensen), Laser Surgeon [okay, not as well known, but the name you'll recognize] (Brenda Laurel), Plundered Hearts, Zork Zero (Amy Briggs), I could go on all day, it seems.
That doesn't even begin to touch on the countless influential women in game design, who bring talents aside from programming to the table like Lucy Bradshaw, Robin Hunicke (who you dismissed without naming earlier), Brenda Brathwaite, Alyssa Finley, Linda Currie ... like the earlier list, this just doesn't end.
The point of all this? That you're not aware of many famous women in games does not mean that there aren't many famous women in games.
Do you know what keeps women out of game development? Attitudes like yours, as illustrated by the aforementioned Dona Bailey.
And before you give me some presto intellectual argument about how they're just conditioned to not want to do these things... Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.
Back in the early 80's something like 40% of CS graduates were women. Why do you think they seem to have collectively chosen to avoid it and related fields? It clearly wasn't a problem earlier, after all.
I think that you know why. You just don't like the answer.
Required reading for internet skeptics