As I mentioned, I was on a panel last week. Been a bit busy so haven’t had a chance to talk about. It went quite well, I thought. There were about 50 people there, and the group was about evenly split between WITI non-gamers and gaming people. Mostly women. There were about 10 women from Harmonix, which was nice to see since I very much admire their work.
First was an hour or so of schmoozing - meeting and greeting. I’m not the best at this area, so walked around with a male co-worker who asks to remain nameless (some people don’t want their doings blabbed on the internet for some reason!). The interesting part was that in two separate encounters we met women, said we work at Mad Doc and the women turned to him and said, “So are you on the panel?” Discussing it later, he said he hadn’t even noticed. But it’s very interesting that there is always this expectation, even in a forum for women that men are the leaders.
The other two panel members were very interesting women. One is the Executive Producer of D&D Online, Judith Hoffman, the other works at a PR company, Laura Tomasetti, currently working on the D&D Online project. They were both at least 10 years older than I am and have had much more of a breadth of experience. I feel quite expert in understanding the jobs that I have held at an independent PC game developer for the past 5+ years. But some questions came in asking how the industry has changed from 10-15 years ago, and I certainly couldn’t answer those. I was in high school then.
The focus of the panel was on two areas, how can we get more women into the industry to make the games and how can we get more women playing games. I haven’t ever been on a panel before, though I’ve certainly been to them. The moderator had a list of questions which I read ahead of time, but about 20 minutes in someone had a question, and from there on out we went off book and just fielded questions and had a very active discussion with the audience.
One interesting point an audience member made was to compare the current state of the game industry to where the film industry was about 15-20 years ago. There’s a similar level of maturation (the word she used, but she meant of the industry, not its employees) and settling into set roles that needs to occur to really make the process of making games more of a business and less of an ad hoc process of guys in their basements. Of course, we’re a long way away from the one-man basement thing, but we are still just stepping into the realm of real project management. I’m on the IGDA’s Women in Game Development listserv, and there was an interesting thread last week about the role of a producer. One woman was interested in becoming a producer and wanted to know what skills were required and what the job entailed. The answers were many and varied. Ultimately, producer means something different at every company. This is the place where we can do some growing up (well, not the only place *grin* ). There are good ways to run projects, and we shouldn’t all be re-inventing the wheel. Anyway, I digress.
It was pretty interesting having a mixed audience. We tend to throw acronyms around all the time without any thought. FPS, RTS, MMO(RPG) - it’s not just in writing, we say these things when we’re talking. One of the funnier moments of the evening came when an audience member was asking for clarification on some of these. Laura had been talking about expanding the market, pulling in more moms. “FPS? What’s that?” We explained, and then she asked, “And moms, what are those?” She thought it was another crazy acronym. Laura meant moms. Mothers. 
We talked about getting more women into the industry. My company, Mad Doc, has about 100 employees now. We have (soon to be) 7 women. That’s all. It’s not for lack of trying, but few women apply. I’m not quite sure why. I’m thinking it’s still because games are considered to be “toys”. They aren’t serious, and aren’t a serious career. (I don’t believe that, that’s just the assumed public perception). With that said, you have to make a serious commitment to get into the industry. It’s terrifically hard to break in, we’re very insular, and the list of applicants if frequently a mile long. So I think that many women just don’t even try - they’d rather not work that hard to get a job that won’t be taken seriously anyway. Let me just say, though, that this is a serious job. It’s hard work, long hours and commitment. So, yeah. It’s a real job.
Another interesting point was from a women who said she’s never even seen jobs posted for game industry jobs. Game companies don’t usually post on Monster.com, we tend to use sites devoted to gaming, like Gamasutra. The casual browser isn’t going to find the jobs, you have to know that’s what you want and seek them out. Of course, most companies have a careers page right on their websites that has job listings, so if you actually are looking for an industry job your best bet is to find the companies in your area and look up their sites.
Oh, while I’m on this tangent, can I share a pet peeve? Research your job targets! I get emails from people who clearly spent about 10 seconds on our website. Spend at least 10 minutes reading up on the company before firing off an email. I got one cover letter talking about how much they wanted to work at Mad DoG. Yeah, nice work there buddy.
All in all, a very positive experience. I felt like we all contributed something interesting. Though there were areas where I was not an expert, there were others that I had a lot more to offer. I’d definitely not mind doing such a thing again.
3 Responses to “Woman Gaming Panel”
Great post! The “moms” incident was hilarious. I don’t know if this will be of any intrest, but in my gender analysis of video game play I found that college age females prefer the music and puzzle genres. Males had many more prefrences that came as no suprise: FPS, RPG, sports, and strategy.
Most women in the study play less than 30 mins a week, while most men tended to play two to four hours. Finally, most women in the study (75%) said that they do not intend to buy or recieve a video game within the next year. Males on average said that they would buy at least 1-5 games.
My psychology prof. is helping me in a new study to try to make FPS, RPGs, sports, and strategy games more appealing to women.
That’s interesting. You might be interested to know that the largest rising population of gamers is actually middle-aged women. Though they tend to play “casual” games. The moderator related an anecdote about this woman who plays a lot of one puzzle game, called Collapse. Apparently she plays at work when she can. When asked how many hours she played, she said, “Well, my boss was away last week, so 40 hours.” So this rising population of women play “casual” games now, but in a much more hardcore manner.
I think you will get more varied results not speaking to college students. Real people (lol) have more time on their hands to do leisure activities. I wouldn’t be surprised if we game a whole lot more than students do.
I agree. College aged women are probably not the best representative sample. But when you are a senior trying to get studies pumped out they sure are tempting to use. There were some really cool similarites too. Racing games seemed to appeal to both genders. Fighting games also seemed to be fairly popular with both genres. I’m supposing that games that could be finished within a couple of minutes tended to appeal to the females of my sample moreso than games with a longer duration of play.