Can this cutting-edge industry thrive if it remains male-dominated?
by Ying (Mara) Guo
Maddie Smiley, a freshman game design student, sees Cynthia from “Pokémon Diamond” as her favorite female character in video games. Being a strong woman in a prominent role in the game, Cynthia empowered Smiley while she was being chastised as a young girl for “liking playing boys’ games.” Now Smiley studies in the Interactive Media and Game Division at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and makes video games.
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Growing up as a gamer and pursuing work in the video game industry, Smiley finds there is absolutely “a stigma for women in games.” The GamerGate controversy of 2014 — when female developers and other women were targeted by an online harassment campaign — illustrates the sexism in this “male-dominated field,” she says.
However, the young game developer, who once deeply doubted whether she belonged, believes that “it’s getting better as time goes on.”
This is not just one woman’s idle dream. The 2017 Developer Satisfaction Survey, conducted by the International Game Developers Association and released in January 2018, measured the demographic composition of the video game industry. Twenty-one percent of respondents listed their gender as female. This is a significant step forward, since women made up 11.5 percent of respondents to the IGDA’s 2005 diversity survey.
Nevertheless, women remain severely underrepresented in the industry when measured against society at large, as 50.8 percent of the population is female, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“Why are there so few lady game creators?” Luke Crane, a game designer and employee of Kickstarter, asked on Twitter in 2012. The response was swift, as hundreds of women (and men too) shared their anecdotes about harassment and other problems in the industry, using the hashtag #1reasonwhy. The question is still valid today.
By some measures, the industry is in great health, as new games pioneer the use of the most advanced technologies, like augmented reality and virtual reality. Companies continue to set new highs for revenue. But many wonder about the future of this rapidly growing industry if it continues to be seen as unfriendly to women.
The post-GamerGate era
GamerGate is frequently mentioned in discussions about sexism in the video game industry, whether in the virtual or the real world. In August 2014, the online hashtag movement began as an attack on Zoë Quinn, a female developer who had created a nontraditional video game, “Depression Quest,” based in part on her own problems with depression. Attackers also targeted atypical games for women or for people of color and harassed feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian as well.
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Evie Powell, president of Verge of Brilliance, a startup game company in Seattle, describes GamerGate as “a very ugly time in gaming history.” After getting her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and working for Microsoft on the Xbox One home video game console for two years, Powell started her own company around 2014, when GamerGate was still a hot topic.
“It was a very stressful time,” Powell recalled. “That’s a shame because a lot of people see that and go, ‘Oh, I don’t need to be in that industry because they hate women, or they hate people of color.’”
Jane Pinckard entered the industry in 2002 as a journalist reporting on video games. After years of experiences organizing game developers conferences, she works as a game design professor at USC. Having experienced intolerant jokes in the office and uncomfortable moments at game expositions, she finds that “we all live in a fairly patriarchal society” and that “it’s easy to overlook sexism.”
Pinckard said she struggled while friends were targeted by GamerGate. The “horrifying and terrible” behavior reminded her of unpleasant experiences on the Internet since the late 1990s.
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“I asked myself all the time: Have things ever changed? And during the height of GamerGate, I really got into a dark place and I started feeling like nothing’s changed. Nothing’s ever going to change,” she said in a soft voice.
“I started questioning, like, what I am doing in games and so on. Obviously, I’m still here, and I’m lucky to still be here. But a lot of women decided it just wasn’t worth it. And I certainly don’t blame them, and I totally understand and support them.”
Hurtful words and harassment left viciously and anonymously on the internet have also left scars in people’s memories. Pinckard’s doubt that whether things have changed can be questioned under the current climate.
Dean Takahashi, a reporter for VentureBeat who has been covering games for two decades for various outlets, observes the changes and trends from the perspective of a male journalist. “Some things are worse because the pro-GamerGate people have been voted to speak out and to criticize. So it’s still in a bad phase.”
Margaret Ng, who said that her 15 years in the gaming industry gave her positive experiences, is development director at Riot Games and manages its diversity and inclusion team. When asked about GamerGate and the trauma it brought, she said things were getting better and it was fortunate that she hasn’t heard as many similar cases happening these days.
Dmitri Williams, an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, was the first researcher to use online games for experiments and to undertake longitudinal research on video games. He summarizes the impact of GamerGate in a succinct and philosophical way: “I think that it probably makes sense to focus on what’s attractive about the game field for women in general rather than focusing on this particular incident because it comes and goes. But the larger structural forces are still there.”
Does a stigma remain?
People on the street were asked whether there’s still a stigma toward women who play or design video games.
Being stigmatized as a female
“Stigma” is the word that many observers associate with females who either play or design video games. Gender expectations have been placed and reinforced for decades and continue haunting women who want to step out of gender roles.
Williams draws on historical perspective and psychology to give some of the background, including “going back to at least a hundred years, the stereotype of the genius young boy inventor.”
“The people who invented a lot of the technologies in this country are often young men, and they would be hero-worshiped,” he said. “And female versions of that are much rarer, and when they have existed, they’ve often been ignored or stamped out.”
“So video game developers largely come out of computer science fields,” Williams said. “And because computer science is not a female-friendly field, the numbers of female computer science graduates are much lower than they are for men. And that means there is a supply-and-demand problem.”
Atley Loughridge, a third-year game design student at USC, has taken courses in the university’s engineering school. She experienced what Williams described, noting that “my experience was 10 percent females in those classes. So you’re sitting in a tiny classroom and there’s three women in it and there’s 30 guys.”
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Chase Chen, a communication management student at USC, has accumulated rich working experiences in both Chinese and American game companies, including Lilith Games, Firefly and Lionsgate.
“Males in the industry, the traditional power, felt threatened and insecure when females flowed in,” she said, “and therefore they tended to misunderstand and even attack women in the industry due to self-protection.”
Chen has her own observations on the imbalance of gender dynamics in the industry: “Though having an origin of male dominance, the video game industry is willing to change because it’s new and burgeoning. It’s been changing, but it’s hard to reach entirely gender equality. There’s a long way to go.”
Riot Games hopes to implement more concrete changes by forming its diversity and inclusion team.
“We are really interested in figuring out what’s going on,” Ng said. “I don’t think we have a really clear answer. But to be honest, we are all just figuring out why this might be happening, so we can diagnose the issue with data and come up with some hypothesis, then we could change the behavior, and by changing behavior we might have impact.”
In terms of stigma, Ng contends that within the gaming industry there’s no direct prejudice toward women, while those people who don’t understand the gaming industry hold negative connotations regarding females working on video games.
Amanda Lange, who works at Microsoft as a software engineer, has been a hard-core gamer since she was young and has taught game design. For her, there was no stigma that said that games were only for boys. She thinks that it’s a wrong approach for the media to only focus on the negative sides of women in tech and in the game industry.
“I don’t think we need to take it to the point of every time you turn around it’s a horror story,” she said, “because you’re going to miss out on encouraging those young women and getting them interested and being the face of change that people need to see.”
Looking Through the Female Lens
Game design students and professors share their experiences and expectations as both gamers and designers.
Why should we include more women in the video game industry?
It creates a space where ideas just don't stagnate. So you kind of experience that every time a new person comes onto a team, no matter if that person is the same race or the same gender or whatever. The more diverse it is, the more there is that sense of “Wow, this is a new person with new ideas and new ways of thinking” because they came from a completely different walk of life than I did. Then, you end up with more ideas that you never heard of before. — Evie Powell, president of Verge of Brilliance, a startup game company in Seattle
The time to acquire female users’ feedback and to adjust the game designing based on their feedback will become shorter if there are female game developers on the team. — Chase Chen, communication management student at USC
I think that the more diversity of backgrounds and thought and processes and ideas that we have, the more creative and more inspiring our work is going to end up being. They have basically proven that diverse teams make better stuff. So why not include and increase diversity? Otherwise, we’re going to keep making the same thing over and over again. — Amanda Lange, software engineer at Microsoft
If you only have one group of people making a piece of content, they make the content they know about. It's not always because they're racist or sexist, but it’s that creators make things based off their own personal experiences. So the “chicken-and-egg problem” here is that it’s best to try to get females involved in the game development process. This will fix most of the problem. — Dmitri Williams, USC professor, the first researcher to use online games for experiments
It’s not just about getting more women in gaming It’s really about getting more diversity of thought, more perspectives in the room. What you don’t want is whatever is in place that’s preventing more women from coming into gaming, to prevent those voices from joining us. So we can make better things and have a different perspective, so we can challenge each other. That’s what we want from diversity. — Margaret Ng, development director at Riot Games
