Women stake out territory in gaming world
In certain corners of the online gaming world, women are treated in one of two ways.
“If you let anyone know you’re a girl, you’re going to get hit on or picked on,” said Tracy Fullerton, a USC professor who teaches game design.
Fullerton was referring to online shooter games, which are traditionally male-dominated. Gaming in general has opened up to women in the last several years, a shift that is part of the industry’s broadening appeal to a wider range of ages and tastes.
But, though women are playing video games in greater numbers, working in the industry can feel as lonely as battling aliens on a remote planet in Halo.
According to the Entertainment Software Assn., 40% of video and online game players in the U.S. in 2010 are female, up from 38% in 2006. The number of women working as game developers, however, is much smaller. In a 2005 survey by the International Game Developers Assn., only 11.5% of the respondents were female.
At Columbia College, Mindy Faber was shocked to discover that the school’s 2009 graduating class of game design majors had one woman out of 26 students. The ratio barely improved in subsequent classes, inspiring Faber to organize a four-day summit recently about girls, gaming and gender at Columbia.
“Our feeling in our department is that clearly, we can make better games if we diversify the designers,” said Faber, academic manager in the department of interactive arts and media. “If the game designers out there are more inclusive and representative of our general culture, we’re going to make better games that reach more people.”
One gap that needs to be addressed, Faber said, is that young girls who like video games don’t connect their leisure activity with a potential career path.
This was the case with Megan-Alyse O’Malley, who started at DePaul University as a secondary-education major. During her freshman year, she attended an event sponsored by DeFRAG, the campus organization for gamers and developers. Her involvement with the group eventually led her to enroll in introductory game development classes.
The experience of “sitting down with a team, brainstorming ideas on what makes a game fun, then working on my first game project” hooked O’Malley, 21, who had grown up playing console games with her siblings. She is now majoring in Japanese studies with a minor in game design.
“I just fell in love with it,” said O’Malley, who will be DeFRAG’s first female president when she returns to school this fall for her senior year. She is also the producer and lone woman on a 20-member student team that is entering a worldwide game development competition next year.
Recruiting more women such as O’Malley to the industry often involves a shift in mind-set so that students understand they can create games for new platforms such as mobile phones and social networking sites, said Jose Zagal, an assistant professor at DePaul.
“When people say video games, a lot of [students] think PlayStation 3,” Zagal said. “When you say, ‘What about a game like Club Penguin or Farmville or that game on your cellphone?’ Then they’re excited.”
Women in the gaming industry have historically worked in departments such as marketing and public relations, rather than in development, art and programming — areas that are directly involved with making games, said Belinda Van Sickle, chief executive of Women in Games International.
“There were a lot of assumptions about women,” Van Sickle said. “People in the industry would assume you don’t play games, or if you do, you’re kind of weird or play games they don’t think count.”
This assumption may be why “female” games often fail to resonate with their intended demographic.
“The games that are marketed to females are awful,” said Keisha Howard, 26, of Chicago, who founded Sugar Gamers, a local meet-up group for female players. “It’s like Cooking Mama: fashion design, pink-little-pony-puppy-kitten. I don’t want to play any of those games, ever. I believe women like the games that are most popular, the blockbuster hits.”
Last year, the top-selling computer game by units was the Sims, according to NPD Group. The game, which allows users to create intricate virtual worlds, is the current obsession of 15-year-old Mary Gilmore of Evanston, Ill. She loves the creativity and detail that goes into playing it, and used to carry around journals to sketch out her house designs before transferring them online.
“It’s not, ‘There are girl games and boy games,’ ” Mary said. “It’s that there are good games and bad games.”
This is also the viewpoint of Erin Robinson, an independent game designer in Naperville, Ill. She graduated from college with a degree in psychology and began creating games after discovering free, downloadable tools on the Web.
“I don’t really know what female players want, but I know what I want in a game,” Robinson said.
Fullerton, the USC professor, noted the rich variety of games being created in the industry and the possibilities that brings for women to play a greater role.
“Now we have families that are growing up playing games together,” she said. “Obviously, we had that in the past in board games, and now we have that in a digital sense. That kind of connection to games as an important element of your family and social life will make people feel differently about the potential they could bring to the industry.”
wawong@tribune.com
