"What Do Women Game Designers Want?"

New York Times (10/14/04) P. E1; Hafner, Katie

Female computer game designers, programmers, and producers are as rare as female game players: About 10 percent of gaming industry professionals are women, and most of them hold jobs in customer service, quality assurance, and marketing, according to informal estimates. Ion Storm executive producer and longtime gamer Denise Fulton observes that a major obstacle to women's pursuit of gaming industry careers is gaming's reputation "as a boy thing." Harvey Mudd College computer science professor Elizabeth Sweedyk, who is designing a female-oriented game design course with a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, thinks that women find computer games unappealing for the most part. At last month's Women's Game Conference in Austin, a common complaint against games in general was graphic violence and sexually suggestive depictions of female characters, while some attendees expressed a desire for games with more immersive story lines and more relatable characters.

Programmer Nicky Robinson, also a game enthusiast, says she felt obliged to improve gaming's appeal to women by designing less cluttered, more intuitive user interfaces. Sony Online Entertainment's Sheri Graner Ray says the first step to getting women interested in careers in game design is to get them interested in playing games by raising awareness. "As we do that, and get more women into the industry, the games they make will have much broader appeal," she remarks. Robinson points out that some game companies are overwhelmingly male-oriented, which can be a further discouragement to women; she notes, for instance, that employees often discuss business in terms of sports metaphors, while upper management harbors a macho attitude.

New York Times (10/14/04) P. E1; Hafner, Katie