I notice today that ‘Attracting Women into Game Development’ is one of the sessions for the Game Developers Conference 2006.
Well, I can think of one reason why they’re lacking women. Offer me a bloody job! I want to develop games!
I may not have the technical whiz-kid C++ expertise for a programmer’s job but there are plenty of project management and other production jobs out there that I could do very well. I’m sure that being a trained programmer who’s developed other software would count for something. But anyway, personal bias aside…
There are four major obstacles to attracting women into games development. In no particular order they are:
Prior Experience
Bringing a new demographic into the would require the games industry (and any industry for that matter) to be willing to hire and train up someone with no prior industry experience. It’s such a basic solution, I don’t know how these people consistently miss (ignore?) it year in and year out. The logic seems to be:
You don’t have enough women in the industry.
You want to hire more women in the industry.
So you make sure that all your job advertisements have “Experience as an Assistant Producer on at least one games title from conception to launch highly preferred, games experience a must and management experience essential. ”
Riiiiiiight…
I just pulled that quote off Datascope for an Assistant Producer job. Of course you’re not going to attract new people if one of your non-negotiable requirements is prior industry experience. *sigh*
I know it’s the same throughout most UK industries. That doesn’t make it any less disheartening.
Industry Awareness
The next big obstacle is simply the knowledge that there are jobs out there. In my three years at uni studying computer science, the sum total of job ads I saw relating to the games industry was… zero. The careers service’s information pack was a printed-out list of websites that they had pulled off the internet and they couldn’t provide any advice on how to get started. If you’re already working in another industry, you don’t ever hear about games development companies. They only ever seem to recruit through the specialist agencies so obviously if you’re not already looking at games development as a career opportunity, you’re not going to stumble across it.
Even for those of us who do the research, there seem to be only two routes. 1) Start as a tester on a rubbish wage and work your way up. Mmm… appealing after 3 years at uni racking up debt. 2) Get established in your chosen job role and then apply. Still requires years of experience in a field you don’t even want to work in before you’re even considered by a games company.
I’m not saying they should make it easier and just hire weaker candidates, but for the fresh graduate with no experience it’s almost impossible to get in unless you’re a brilliant programmer who’s been coding as a hobby for years, or a talented artist. If they want new blood, companies need to be willing to put in the investment to train those new people. Even for an established project manager, out of fifteen job adverts on Aardvark Swift today, only one of them doesn’t list prior games industry experience as a requirement.
Quality of Life
Once you find a company willing to take on someone from outside the industry, there’s the giant spectre of Quality of Life that hangs over it. What sane woman (or indeed person) is going to give up an established career at a firm that offers flexible working hours, a company car and day care facilities in favour of 40 hours a week of unpaid overtime? This is a big issue that’s much more thoroughly and personally discussed here by ea_spouse.
Science
The uptake rates of science-based courses are dropping in this country year after year. In order to address this, kids need to be encouraged from before GCSE-level to continue with science. Most girls (and boys) these days have been exposed to more than one console game each. What better time to tap that youthful enthusiasm and energy than right then? Run presentations on the vast range of opportunities in gaming around the time of course selections? Kids who are considering going into medicine know that they need to study at least two science subjects for their GCSEs. Why not encourage other kids to target game development as a career? They’re already playing them.
You may have noticed that all of these can apply equally to men and women. That’s because I believe that there’s no inherent gender barrier to gaming recruitment and the current bias is due to historic recruitment practices. Most people I’ve met in game development don’t come anywhere close to the level of misogynism that you hear about in sectors like banking, yet banking still attracts plenty of female applicants. The game development industry needs to get its affairs in order to recruit new people, not just the self-confessed lifelong geeks and hobbyists that are the only group it freely admits.
Do I just come across as a bitter reject? Hmm… maybe I am, but are any of my comments unjustified?
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July 19th, 2006 at 9:57 pm
Its the age-old problem. You can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job.
People won’t work on game development, male or female, for 2 main reasons:
1 - Publishers are ruthless and dictate everything, which kinda sucks the fun outta it.
2 - Very poor benefits, very poor pay (compared to other similarly-educated industries), and very crappy quality of life. No sane person would do it, and those that do only do so out of intense love for the field or because they get a lucky break and know someone.
So its pretty obvious we need to fire the people in HR and get some good recruiters in place. Female recruiters. ^_^
One last thing, seems obvious, but how about not having all these teenage-fanboy supermodel-women avatars in games? How do you think that makes women feel when they’re objectivized like that? Its one thing to see it in a movie (with real people) but its another thing to play a game like that (aside from Tomb Raider: Legends, which has an excuse).
August 2nd, 2006 at 2:46 pm
“Its the age-old problem. You can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job….”
That’s just not true. You CAN make games without having a job doing so. All you need is a PC and some skillz. If you’ve never worked on a game before, why would anyone in a games company employ you?!? It makes no sense.
“In my three years at uni studying computer science, the sum total of job ads I saw relating to the games industry was… zero”
You can’t have been looking in the right places. Did you check out any of the agencies? Or the adverts in the back of MCV / Develop?
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:04 pm
Chicknstu:
You missed my point of that paragraph about not seeing job ads. It’s not that the jobs weren’t out there. It’s that places like my University careers service didn’t know anything about them and for someone like me - fresh out of Singapore who didn’t even know there was a thriving games development industry in the UK - how the hell am I gonna know what MCV is, or where to pick up a copy? The careers service couldn’t even point me towards Datascope or Aardvark Swift, though when I wrote to those agencies they both wrote back saying that they didn’t normally deal with people without prior industry experience (though a recruiter from one of them said that my CV showed my enthusiasm for games so he’d let me know if he came across any suitable jobs ;) ).
As for making games without experience - yeah, you can make them. The ads that were around at the time (I wrote this last November, note) were all “experience on 1 (or 2 or 5) published title(s)” which, as you know, is a bit different from saying that you’re working on your own homebrew or a level or game developed in your spare time. There has been an industry shift since then. Climax are now advertising for Graduate/Trainee programmers and artists. Hell, Aardvark Swift even has an entire Graduate Jobs section, which it certainly didn’t in November 2005.
Finally, “If you’ve never worked on a game before, why would anyone in a games company employ you?!?”
Why should you hire a QA tester with no formal coding training over a trained programmer? Surely someone with proven coding skills is cheaper to teach the games-specific stuff than someone who knows bug-identifying but nothing about writing clean, scalable, transferable, fully-commented(!) code? Different people have different skills and it makes no sense to limit your pool of recruitment to people who can afford a home PC when you can also get people fully trained from other industries or universities.
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:35 am
QA is one thing, but in your first sentence you said “I want to develop games!”. If your talking about the people who actually MAKE the game, then there’s definately an advantage to hiring someone who has Developed a game over someone who hasn’t.
Why not just put something togethor? Even something simple like space invaders or pong would accelerate you above someone who’s only ever programmed databases.
“writing clean, scalable, transferable, fully-commented(!) code”
I’ve heard legends of such code, but so far I haven’t seen it with my own eyes!
BTW, have you got an email address? I’ll forward you those contact details.
Stu xxx
August 3rd, 2006 at 10:31 am
Oh, of course. I’m not saying there’s no advantage at all if you get two people with the same training but one worked on a game and one didn’t.
As I said, I was talking about the ads asking for experience on published and shipped games which, by definition, excludes people who aren’t already employed by a developer including those who worked on their own projects but never got picked up by a publisher for whatever reason. If you already have industry contacts I’m sure working on your own stuff will provide an advantage. The article was more a reaction to the logic which apparently went something like this:
Lots of women don’t play games.
Women will know what games they would like.
We need to hire women who aren’t already developing games in order to change the way we design.
So we’ll recruit people who already make games.
Here’s a round-table discussion from October 05 with some women who are already developing games.
Thanks for the advice. I’m actually looking more towards level design or production/project management rather than programming so I’m playing around with ready-built construction kits (TES, Neverwinter Nights) in my spare time. I’ll email you.