Headlines
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Thursday, October 14, 2004
Game development still remains a male dominated industry, but women are making some inroads.
From The International Herald Tribune, "Informal estimates put the proportion of women in the industry at around 10 percent, and most of them tend to be in customer service, marketing or quality assurance. Relatively few women work as game designers and producers, and even fewer are programmers."
"'It's not so much that women look at the industry and discard the idea,' said Sheri Graner Ray, a senior game designer at Sony Online Entertainment. 'It's that the game industry just never even comes up on their radar.'"
"The reason has to do with a truism about the computer game industry: those who work in the industry tend to enter their jobs as avid gamers. And playing video games, especially those loaded with graphic violence, has been a male pursuit. According to NPD Group, a market research firm based in New York, some 81 percent of video game players are male."
"'It's a chicken-or-egg thing,' said Fulton, who sees a lot of rsums in her job, almost all from men. 'If more women were playing games, they might get interested in games as a medium and might choose to pursue that as a career. But it's still stigmatized as a boy thing.'"
.
Now, though, manufacturers are starting to think about making games that are more appealing to women, like The Sims, a role-playing game that is viewed as one of the most popular games among women.
.
"Do women not play games because the games that are out there are designed for men, or is it just that women really don't like computer games?" said Elizabeth Sweedyk, an assistant professor of computer science at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. "My guess is they don't like the games that are out there."
.
Manufacturers now see a huge untapped portion of the market. "They've realized they have to appeal to women," said David Riley, senior manager at NPD. And as more games are marketed to, and played by, girls and women, more women may end up choosing careers in the industry.
.
Until then, though, people like Fulton and like Nicky Robinson, a programmer, will be the exceptions.
.
Robinson, 44, is accustomed to being one of the few female programmers working on games. She grew up playing board games of all kinds and then was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing fantasy game that used dice, pen and paper.
.
"That completely captured my imagination," Robinson said. Later came to Rogue, a dungeons-and-dragons adventure game played on a computer.
.
She entered the game industry when she was 23 and has worked on more than a dozen games, including some unequivocally male-oriented titles like Battle Tanx and Army Men.
.
Robinson said she felt an obligation to make games more appealing to women. She has worked to make the user interfaces more intuitive. "I personally loathe interfaces that are cluttered," she said.
.
Robinson also dislikes the atmosphere at some game companies. There are the constant sports metaphors she has heard in the course of developing and shipping products, for instance. "Does everything need to be expressed in terms of 'fourth and goal?"' she asked. "How about a nice literary allusion?"
.
Then, she said, there is the attitude among upper management that she believes pervades many game-software companies. "They all have to prove that they are tougher and more macho than the guys in the other department or at the other company," she said.
.
Now Robinson is director of technology at LimeLife, in Menlo Park, California, whose goal is to make mobile phone applications especially for women. She had the chance to air some of her frustrations last month in Austin at the Women's Game Conference, held in conjunction with a broader industry gathering, the Austin Game Conference.
.
The event was attended by about 150 women, most of them designers, marketers, educators or students. Some of the sessions were devoted to brainstorming about ways to entice more women into the gaming industry.
.
The process starts, most agreed, by designing video games that appeal more to women. But what do women want in a video game?
.
Not, many agreed, a lot of graphic violence. They said that first-person shooter games, especially those with female characters depicted in sexually suggestive ways, were offensive. "The more abstracted the violence, the better I feel about it," said LaMaia Cramer, a designer and programmer.
.
Robinson said that while producing Army Men, she argued that women were more likely to be drawn to a game based on plastic figures. "The violence of melting or blowing up a plastic figure was something we'd done, so it wasn't going to turn women off," she said. "And indeed, the game was played by far more women than similar games with realistic human figures."
.
Some women said they wanted to see more characters they could relate to, as well as "instant immersion" in a game's story line. "I know I'm opening a can of worms," one young attendee said, "but I'd like to see more romance."
.
Sweedyk said The Sims was popular among women because of the social interaction among the game's custom-built characters. With a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Sweedyk is developing a course intended to encourage women to build computer games for women. The course, which Sweedyk says is the first of its kind of the United States, will be offered beginning next semester.
.
For Fulton, one of the things that appealed to her about designing the new Deus Ex game is that players are given the option of a less violent version. As a producer, she said, she is drawn to work on games that attract a wider audience. "I definitely want to continue to work on titles that are more than the standard, violence-based, shoot-and-kill play style," she said.
.
But her job at Ion Storm, she added, demands that she maximize the potential success of the titles she works on. "I can encourage the development of features that might have a broader appeal but ultimately need to fulfill the expectations of publisher and market," she said.
.
Like Robinson and Fulton, Laura Fryer, 36, grew up playing games associated with boys. An avid Dungeons and Dragons fan while in high school, Fryer went on to work at Microsoft nearly 12 years ago in a game-testing division and gradually worked her way up.
.
Now an executive producer, Fryer supervises a group developing games for the Xbox. She said she saw a difference from when she was younger. "A lot more women are playing games" than when she was in high school, she said.
.Denise Fulton spent much of her childhood playing computer games. At 8, while growing up in Ohio, she was already playing Zork, Adventure and other text-based games. And the fascination continued into her adult years.
.
So it is not surprising that today Fulton, 34, is an executive producer at Ion Storm, a video game company in Austin, Texas, where she is overseeing the next installment in the popular Deus Ex series.
.
The surprising part is how rare Fulton is. Behind the computer screen, as in front of it, video games are a man's world.
.
Informal estimates put the proportion of women in the industry at around 10 percent, and most of them tend to be in customer service, marketing or quality assurance. Relatively few women work as game designers and producers, and even fewer are programmers.
.
"It's not so much that women look at the industry and discard the idea," said Sheri Graner Ray, a senior game designer at Sony Online Entertainment. "It's that the game industry just never even comes up on their radar."
.
The reason has to do with a truism about the computer game industry: those who work in the industry tend to enter their jobs as avid gamers. And playing video games, especially those loaded with graphic violence, has been a male pursuit. According to NPD Group, a market research firm based in New York, some 81 percent of video game players are male.
.
"It's a chicken-or-egg thing," said Fulton, who sees a lot of r驩sums in her job, almost all from men. "If more women were playing games, they might get interested in games as a medium and might choose to pursue that as a career. But it's still stigmatized as a boy thing."
.
Now, though, manufacturers are starting to think about making games that are more appealing to women, like The Sims, a role-playing game that is viewed as one of the most popular games among women.
.
"Do women not play games because the games that are out there are designed for men, or is it just that women really don't like computer games?" said Elizabeth Sweedyk, an assistant professor of computer science at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. "My guess is they don't like the games that are out there."
.
Manufacturers now see a huge untapped portion of the market. "They've realized they have to appeal to women," said David Riley, senior manager at NPD. And as more games are marketed to, and played by, girls and women, more women may end up choosing careers in the industry.
.
Until then, though, people like Fulton and like Nicky Robinson, a programmer, will be the exceptions.
.
Robinson, 44, is accustomed to being one of the few female programmers working on games. She grew up playing board games of all kinds and then was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing fantasy game that used dice, pen and paper.
.
"That completely captured my imagination," Robinson said. Later came to Rogue, a dungeons-and-dragons adventure game played on a computer.
.
She entered the game industry when she was 23 and has worked on more than a dozen games, including some unequivocally male-oriented titles like Battle Tanx and Army Men.
.
Robinson said she felt an obligation to make games more appealing to women. She has worked to make the user interfaces more intuitive. "I personally loathe interfaces that are cluttered," she said.
.
Robinson also dislikes the atmosphere at some game companies. There are the constant sports metaphors she has heard in the course of developing and shipping products, for instance. "Does everything need to be expressed in terms of 'fourth and goal?"' she asked. "How about a nice literary allusion?"
.
Then, she said, there is the attitude among upper management that she believes pervades many game-software companies. "They all have to prove that they are tougher and more macho than the guys in the other department or at the other company," she said.
.
Now Robinson is director of technology at LimeLife, in Menlo Park, California, whose goal is to make mobile phone applications especially for women. She had the chance to air some of her frustrations last month in Austin at the Women's Game Conference, held in conjunction with a broader industry gathering, the Austin Game Conference.
.
The event was attended by about 150 women, most of them designers, marketers, educators or students. Some of the sessions were devoted to brainstorming about ways to entice more women into the gaming industry.
.
The process starts, most agreed, by designing video games that appeal more to women. But what do women want in a video game?
.
Not, many agreed, a lot of graphic violence. They said that first-person shooter games, especially those with female characters depicted in sexually suggestive ways, were offensive. "The more abstracted the violence, the better I feel about it," said LaMaia Cramer, a designer and programmer.
.
Robinson said that while producing Army Men, she argued that women were more likely to be drawn to a game based on plastic figures. "The violence of melting or blowing up a plastic figure was something we'd done, so it wasn't going to turn women off," she said. "And indeed, the game was played by far more women than similar games with realistic human figures."
.
Some women said they wanted to see more characters they could relate to, as well as "instant immersion" in a game's story line. "I know I'm opening a can of worms," one young attendee said, "but I'd like to see more romance."
.
Sweedyk said The Sims was popular among women because of the social interaction among the game's custom-built characters. With a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Sweedyk is developing a course intended to encourage women to build computer games for women. The course, which Sweedyk says is the first of its kind of the United States, will be offered beginning next semester.
.
For Fulton, one of the things that appealed to her about designing the new Deus Ex game is that players are given the option of a less violent version. As a producer, she said, she is drawn to work on games that attract a wider audience. "I definitely want to continue to work on titles that are more than the standard, violence-based, shoot-and-kill play style," she said.
.
But her job at Ion Storm, she added, demands that she maximize the potential success of the titles she works on. "I can encourage the development of features that might have a broader appeal but ultimately need to fulfill the expectations of publisher and market," she said.
.
Like Robinson and Fulton, Laura Fryer, 36, grew up playing games associated with boys. An avid Dungeons and Dragons fan while in high school, Fryer went on to work at Microsoft nearly 12 years ago in a game-testing division and gradually worked her way up.
.
Now an executive producer, Fryer supervises a group developing games for the Xbox. She said she saw a difference from when she was younger. "A lot more women are playing games" than when she was in high school, she said.
.Denise Fulton spent much of her childhood playing computer games. At 8, while growing up in Ohio, she was already playing Zork, Adventure and other text-based games. And the fascination continued into her adult years.
.
So it is not surprising that today Fulton, 34, is an executive producer at Ion Storm, a video game company in Austin, Texas, where she is overseeing the next installment in the popular Deus Ex series.
.
The surprising part is how rare Fulton is. Behind the computer screen, as in front of it, video games are a man's world.
.
Informal estimates put the proportion of women in the industry at around 10 percent, and most of them tend to be in customer service, marketing or quality assurance. Relatively few women work as game designers and producers, and even fewer are programmers.
.
"It's not so much that women look at the industry and discard the idea," said Sheri Graner Ray, a senior game designer at Sony Online Entertainment. "It's that the game industry just never even comes up on their radar."
.
The reason has to do with a truism about the computer game industry: those who work in the industry tend to enter their jobs as avid gamers. And playing video games, especially those loaded with graphic violence, has been a male pursuit. According to NPD Group, a market research firm based in New York, some 81 percent of video game players are male
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