Women in Games Mixer At The London Games Festival
Helen Kennedy (UWE), Nichola Bhalereo (Rare) and Matthew Jeffery (EA) meet the audience.
While Will Wright and other gaming luminaries shared war stories and waited tenaciously for the results of the BAFTA award ceremony, those of us scared off by the dress code decided to meet a Central St. Martins Innovation Centre for the Women in Games Mixer, the first event of its kind, hosted by Thayer Driver of Makeyourmark and Emma Westecott, Senior Games Researcher at UWN, and previously Producer on such titles as Starship Titanic.
The evening was aimed at raising awareness of the role and representation of women in games culture and industry. Representatives from the education, women in development and recruitment took to the panel, and the conversation centered on the degree to which the games industry has really tried to reflect and promote new ways of making games for women and girls that go beyond dip-dying consoles "pink", brushing horses till the cows come home, and choosing shoes for a certain brand-name plastic princess.
Read on after the jump...
The audience contained a real mix of voices from research, industry, art and the media, that had come to the event as part of the London Games Festival, and it is fair to say that there was a definite gender balance. Panelist Helen Kennedy, who teaches and researches games at the University of the West of England, spoke on how the competitive, pro-gamer and macho atmosphere of the development house actively dissuades young women from pursuing games as a career after college, and that the industry needs to seriously think about the potential of recruiting team-members without necessarily assuming that they will be fanatical players. Her suggestion that those working on game development were exploited (in terms of working hours, pay, and so on) because companies exploit people's fandom for games certainly left people pondering how the industry might change to address this.
Responses and additional comments came from Nichola Bhalereo, senior software engineer for Rare who has most recently worked on Viva Pinata. She described her own childhood experience of games, her early passion for programming, and daily duels with her brother for time on the computer. Placing emphasis on her first experiences of paid work, Nichola described how she went into general IT software development because of a sense that the games industry was closed to her, defined by the machismo of the bedroom coder.
Last on the panel was Matthew Jeffrey, head of European Recruitment for EA, who spoke of the difference in the gender balance between the player base of EA franchises such as The Sims, and the teams that develop them. While The Sims has a 65% female player base, while in the team women only make up around 10% of the development team. He suggested that EA wanted to lead in the process of addressing this discrepancy, by bringing more women into development, in particular in project management roles, where he observed their impact on reducing the macho culture of 'crunch' for which EA has attracted much controversy in recent years.
After a series of questions from the audience which drew out the finer details of the panelists points, we broke out into the more general networking event, where young hopefuls could meet and greet experienced designers, educators and events organizers. In my view the night was a resounding success, and I was especially interested in Matthew's active role in expressing EA's commitment to these issues. It will be interesting to see how things roll out over the next year.
SuperSpecialDavey
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 24 October 2007
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: London Games Festival, WIG, Women In Games
Hiya,
Great write up, thanks so much :) I was hoping if possible you could change the Make Your Mark link to http://www.makeyourmark.org.uk which is the correct site :)
Thanks so much, and glad you enjoyed it.
Oh, also, my pics from the night are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thayer18/sets/72157602674903704/
Hopefully bump into you again soon,
Thayer x