Wanted: Girls who make video games

Kristin Kalning Games editor • E-mail

Lucy was at a Game Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif., several years back, on her way to a business lunch. When she walked into the restaurant, she realized that she was awash in what she describes as a “sea of guys.”

“I was really taken aback,” she says. “Except for the wait staff, I was the only woman in the room.”

Lucy Bradshaw is vice-president and head of production and development at Maxis, the studio responsible for a few games you may have heard of, like “The Sims” franchise. Bradshaw has many successes to her credit, including “The Sims 2,” the fastest-selling PC game of all time. She’s currently leading a team that’s working on the studio’s highly anticipated “Spore” title.

But even though Bradshaw is a big shot in the game industry, she’s still a minority in a sea of guys. While exact numbers are difficult to chase down, the International Game Developers Association estimated that just under 12 percent of the game workforce is made up of women.

If you think those stats mirror the percentage of gamers that are female, think again. Women gamers comprise 38 percent of all players, says the Entertainment Software Association. And women make up 42 percent of all online gamers, according to a recent study from the NPD Group.

'Games are redefining themselves'
“Women are playing games now, in part because computers are much more part of our lives,” says Bradshaw. “Games are redefining themselves.”

So what difference does it make if the people who make those games are overwhelmingly white, male and young?

“Because everyone out there experiences games differently,” says Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom, senior producer at Harmonix Music Systems, the company that created the “Guitar Hero” franchise. “If you have a diverse team, you can create a game that satisfies a much wider audience than if you have a homogeneous team.”

James Cheng / MSNBC.com Jen Carlson, left, and Andréa Wicklund at Gameswork in Seattle. Carlson and Wicklund both work in the male-dominated video game industry.

Ten years ago, reaching a wide audience wouldn’t have even made the radar at most game companies. Back then, the industry was content to target the same crowd it always had — males  aged 18 to 35. With few exceptions, developers churned out titles that were heavy on gunplay, blood sport and hyper-sexualized female characters. Even Lara Croft, star of the hugely successful “Tomb Raider” franchise, was as well-known for her outsize assets as her ability to kick ass.

Do diverse teams translate to broader reach?
But around 2000, the immature industry started to grow up. There were big profits to be made, and as such, small studios with interesting properties were gobbled up by large, market-savvy corporations like Electronic Arts and Activision. These companies wanted to continue market growth — but the industry was growing faster than the market it was targeting, says Sheri Graner Ray, a 20-year game biz veteran and executive chair of Women in Games International.

“[These companies] realized they had to diversify their audience,” she says.  “To do that, companies had to diversify their workforce.”

Things are changing...slowly
How far have things come in seven years? Most of the women I talked to say that things are changing — although the level of change depends on who you talk to — and what department you work in. More women have joined the ranks in human resources, marketing and public relations — and you’re likely to see some female artists, too. But men still hold the majority of programming and design jobs at game companies — which at most companies, are the positions that steer the games.

Jen Carlson, a programmer at Sierra Online, remembers that at her first game job, more than five years ago, she was the lone coder in her department. And the ratio hasn’t changed much since. 

“I don’t think this disparity is only in games,” she says. “It’s throughout the tech industry.”

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