#1reasonwhy

Ugh, Emotions: Part I

CW: Harassment, exclusion.

This is a difficult set of posts for me to write, because they admit to my own complicity in a culture I desperately want to change.

To understand gaming, the games industry and the gaming culture it’s necessary to understand some of the backstory of the nerd culture. We’ve been considered underdogs and weirdos, and we’ve been attacked by priests, politicians,…

This is a new decade (well, technically, it’s not really a new decade until 2021, but who’s counting) and there are a bunch of retrospectives out there. This is… maybe not so much a retrospective as a reflection.

If existing in the gaming culture has taught me one thing it’s that we tend to forget very easily. “We” being your average, mainstream gamer. Not the actual average mainstream gamer,…

Girl Scouts Chapter Introduces Game Design Merit Badge

The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles have introduced a Game Design merit badge to help encourage its members to get interested in a variety of science and technology fields.

The L.A. Girl Scouts chapter partnered with the Women in Games International organization to create a curriculum for the patch. Girls will be required to program their games as well as design them, using software called Gamestar Mechanic.

The games industry has recently been more aware of the gender discrepancies in its ranks. A few months ago game creators took to hashtag #1reasonwhy to talk about reasons the industry doesn't employ enough women, uncovering issues like sexism in some workplaces. A game design merit badge could certainly be one way to get more young women interested in programming and creating games as a career.

Not a new post but I'm reposting this as I originally shared it as private back in 2013, and this is a great initiative.

"Women talked about having their work dismissed and ignored, having designs for non-sexualised female characters rejected, their clothing and appearance being used to dismiss them on gender grounds, and, at the more extreme end, sexual harassment at conferences.

There were women speaking up about being afraid to speak up, and a chorus of thanks for those speaking on and supporting the tag. As it caught on, the discussion broadened to encompass a critique of gender issues in games themselves - expressions of frustration at having to remind colleagues that their players might be female, and at the prevailing focus and topics of AAA games."

Many people who are familiar with sexism in the gaming industry have called it a three-pronged problem stemming from lack of diverse representation in games, lack of representation in the gaming industry, and then the whole problem with the often loudly misogynistic gaming community. Thanks to Gamasutra’s Game Developer Salary Survey 2014 we can take a look at the gender gap in various levels of…