Posted on: Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Video games still man's work
By Matt Slagle
Associated Press
AUSTIN, Texas — Jennifer Canada knew she was entering a boy's club when she enrolled in Southern Methodist University's Guildhall school of video game making.
Associated Press "It's really different," the 23-year-old Indianapolis native said. "I miss having a lot of women friends."
The $10 billion industry may have entered the mainstream, but with few exceptions, the target audience for big-budget video games is the same as ever: teenage boys gripped with visions of dragons, space ships and voluptuous virtual babes.
It doesn't help that the number of women developing games is also low — fewer than 10 percent of all game developers, said Guildhall executive director Peter Raad.
"I believe it behooves the gaming industry to attract more women developers," Raad said. "Playing games is a primal human activity that knows no boundaries of geography, language or gender."
Organizers said the recent Women's Game Conference in Austin was a step toward changing some long-held assumptions about those who make and play games.
"Games are no longer just for geeks," said Laura Fryer, director of Microsoft Corp.'s Advanced Technology Group, which includes the company's Xbox console. "Half of our population probably has an opinion about what should be in video games, but it goes unnoticed because we don't have a lot of women in the industry."
Many believe education is key to boosting the ranks of female video game makers. Because games require a broad range of expertise, including artists, musicians and architects, it's really a matter of letting women know they don't have to be programmers to work on games, Fryer said.
At SMU, Guildhall has partnered with online female job recruiting Web site Mary-Mar garet.com and the game review Web site WomenGamers.com to create what's believed to be the first video game scholarship for women. The scholarship will provide about $18,500, half the cost of an 18-month certification program.
Canada, who enrolled at SMU after graduating from Rice University this year, said she was drawn to games — namely "The Sims" — because of her passion for architecture.
"The first game I played, I pretty much took over someone else's computer playing it," she said. "I liked building houses. I liked decorating the house and using cheat codes to get tons of money so I could build bigger houses."
Many agree there needs to be more thought-provoking, story-driven games with more female leads and less carnage.
According to the Entertainment Software Association, about 40 percent of gamers are women. And experts say older women are big gamers online, though they tend to gravitate to time-passers such as checkers, chess and Scrabble.
That hardly means all girls despise shoot-em-ups.
Ismini Roby, co-founder of WomenGamers.com, said it's a stereotype that women are interested only in simple puzzles or card games.
"We don't all like pink, and we don't all like the same types of games," she said. "The reality is that women like a variety of genres. Saying differently is like saying all men like science fiction movies."
There's one other woman; the other 98 students are guys. The ratio may be great for dating, she jokes, but she sometimes got lonely.
Jennifer Canada plays a video game in Plano, Texas. The 23-year-old student at Southern Methodist University is one of two females in the university's video game making school, with 98 guys.
