PlayFirst at Casual Connect: It Pays to Hire Women in Games Panel

This year the Gamesauce Conference premiered, the day before Casual Connect, July 19. It's a conference for game developers "intended to get you to stop doing for a few minutes so that you might spend a little time thinking. Thinking about your place and your purpose and your passion."

I proposed a panel for the Leadership and Development track of the conference, which was organized by Women in Games International (WIGI), IGDA Women in Games & WIG Vancouver. The organizers wanted a panel on "the benefits of hiring women in the game industry". My plan was to gather several awesome and talented women in the biz, get them talking, and let their achievements speak for themselves.  The panel was very positive since all of us have had really positive experiences in the industry, as people (not just as women).

Solveig Pederson Zarubin, Brenda Brathwaite, Anne Grant, Carrie Heeter, Maryann Klingman

This was my first time moderating a panel, and my first time at Casual Connect, so I was a bit nervous. This photo caught us at an especially serious moment; there was a lot of laughter on the panel as well.

Some statistics about the people who buy and make casual games, as presented in the panel:

• Almost 75% of the people who buy casual games in general are women, yet overall in the industry, only about 12-15% of game developers are women.

And here's some anecdotal PlayFirst data which bucks these stats a bit. I didn't include this in the panel, but readers of this blog may be interested:

• 8% of overall game industry designers are women.
• 27% of PlayFirst's designers are women! 
• I did not have a statistic on overall game industry execs, but PlayFirst's exec staff is 38% female.

As an industry, one of the points behind the panel was to promote the idea that the more diversity (of all kinds) we have on the teams that make games for you, our players, the better the games will be!

Getting into the game industry

From many of the panels at the Leadership Track that day, one big takeaway is AWARENESS. Just making sure more women know that the game industry is a viable option, with many different creative paths, is one of the best ways to get more women into the industry.

When asked how they entered the game industry, almost everyone (including me!) that morning mentioned "serendipity" or just falling into the career through various means. Not many of us talked about having a childhood dream of working in the game industry; however, this is hopefully changing in the younger generation:

Brenda Brathwaite, Creative Director at Lolapps,  told a story about her young daughter, who was told by a boy in her class "Girls don't play video games."

Her response, "My mom makes them."

Brenda passionately loves to make games! According to the research of Ernest Adams, Brenda is "the longest serving female game developer in the business." She is a veteran game designer and artist, in the industry since 1981, when she got her start as a playtester on Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. At the panel, she told us that the interview for that job actually happened in the women's restroom at her high school, where another student (Linda Currie, who was already working in the industry) asked her if she had a job.  Her response was "no" and there began a career!

Many connections actually do happen like this in the work world in general and the game industry is no exception.  Most of the other panelists throughout the day told similar serendipitous stories.

For example, my first job in games was also as a tester (on a very different game - Madeline European Adventures!) and I found out about it through a contact I made volunteering for a non-profit while in my senior year of college. I had been working as a web designer but looking to create electronic content that was a bit more lasting (and more fun!).

Here are 2 of the other women who spoke at the panel, together at the Casual Connect Speakers' Dinner on Wednesday night:  Anne Grant, Game Production Manager at Her Interactive, on the left, and Maryann Klingman, Developer Relations Manager at PlayFirst, on the far right. In the middle is Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, CEO of a new company called Silicon Sisters Interactive which develops games for girls and women.

It was great to meet Anne for the first time at this conference. Anne shared a great story about her successful attempts (with Alena, who's now at PlayFirst, producer of The Fifth Gate) to get quiet engineers to just say "Good Morning!" every day, instead of going directly to their desks and starting to code. Getting them out of their cubes and talking to people helped communication overall on the team and made problem solving on their games so much easier! Alena still keeps up this tradition at PlayFirst with her cheery "Good morning!" to us every day.

At the panel (and at dinner the night before) I asked Anne for some tips from her career:

Anne advised that one thing she has learned over her career as a game developer (and in her personal life) is to make conscious choices about how she is spending her time, and how those choices relate back to her overall personal and professional goals. That way, regardless of the external praise or motivation, what she does feels rewarding because she knows it fits in with her priorities.

Maryann Klingman has been in the industry for 17 years and is part of 2 generations of female game developers (one of her daughters works at Electronic Arts as a producer!)  Both of her daughters have visited companies she's worked for when they were young and tested games. 

Maryann told a great story: her daughter proudly told her friends that her mom was going to GDC (The Game Developers' Conference).  This surprised the friends, who wondered why a mom would be attending GDC.

Girl vs. boy designers

I've known the 4th panelist, Carrie Heeter, Ph.D., for over 4 years - we met at the Women in Games conference in San Francisco in 2006, and since then we started a small lunch group for women interested in games, that meets monthly here in the Bay Area. She is a professor at Michigan State University and tele-teaches her classes from her home in San Francisco!

At the panel, Carrie presented findings from the "Alien" study [1] she conducted. In this study, boys and girls (middle school age) worked in same-gender same-grade teams to invent space exploration learning games.

One interesting takeaway was that the girl designers, even as kids, discussed and accommodated the possibility that males may play their games (1 group named the main character SAM so that it would work for either gender). Kids who saw the promos made from the "girl" games thought that these games were more "for everyone."

Boy design teams did not consider female players. 3 of 4 teams did not talk about girls playing their games at all. The 4th team did include 5 avatar choices, 2 of them female. However they called out both female choices as "bad-tempered." Kids who saw the promo games made from the "boy" games thought the games looked like they were "for boys".

Other highlights

Other bullet points from the panel, tweeted by attendee and moderator for another panel, Karen Clark:

• Awareness of games by younger women so different than the experience women in the industry had even 10 years ago.
• Game industry people - make a plan to talk to some kids about making games. I promise they will be interested!
• Women heading lots of game dev programs at colleges and universities - major touch point for girls who want to make games! (Also, when talking with women in the game industry, many are unaware of their academic "sisters" - having Prof. Heeter on the panel hopefully will help forge these connections).
• Women have more opportunities now in college, at least, to start a career in games. (Game design programs in the US and Canada)

Overall I really appreciated this opportunity to get out of my comfort zone a bit and meet so many new people at the conference.  I'm already thinking of ideas for other future panels at other events!

What did you think about the percentage of women working in games? What about the results of the Alien study? Tell us in the comments!

Written by: Sunpath

Footnotes:

• [1] From study - Alien Games: Do girls prefer games designed by girls (Published in Games & Culture Journal (2009) – Heeter, Egidio, Mishra, Winn, Winn

The panelists:

• Maryann Klingman - Developer Relations Manager at PlayFirst. She has been in the industry for 17 years, as a producer, director, and developer relations manager, with over 40 titles, 5 companies, and several genres from educational to casual.
• Anne Grant - Game Production Manager at Her Interactive. Anne has been managing the production of the Nancy Drew line of games like clockwork for 8 years (17 games!). She also has a computer science background and manages and mentors scripters and other engineers at Her Interactive.
• Brenda Brathwaite - Creative Director at Lolapps. Brenda currently works on social media games and her own independent projects, such as a series of non-digital games called "The Mechanic is the Message" with Train being the most well known of these. She talked about Train at the Gamesauce conference too -- here's a link to the same talk given at GDC 2010, the Game Developers Conference.
• Carrie Heeter, Ph.D. - Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media and Creative Director for Virtual University Design and Technology (VUdat) at Michigan State University. She is also founder and curator of investiGaming.com, a repository of research findings on gender and gaming. She co-founded the MSU’s Serious Game Design MA program (the first of its kind).