SXSW: Women In The Games Industry Are Not Unicorns

While moderating the SXSW panel on Women in the Video game industry on Tuesday, A.J. Glasser of Inside Network made a few basic points that are often overlooked by male gamers. Women play games. Women make games. Women write about games. A woman who does any of these things is not, in Glasser’s words “a magical unicorn or a white elk.” Yes, women may have different taste in games and content than men do, but that doesn’t necessarily imply a massive, hard and fast gender split in who makes what. As panelist Cara Ely, a creative director at Zynga, put it, “You make the games you want to play.”

Glasser interviewed Ely; Rachel Berstein, executive producer from Maxis Studio; and Allison Rynak, VP of marketing at GSN Digital, a site affiliated with the Gameshow Network, that provides casual games. While each woman’s career path has led them through different facets of the industry, they all agreed on one thing: It was their passion for games, not their gender, that most defined their relationship with the industry and their colleagues.

Certainly, these women often have had a different perspective on what makes interesting or entertaining games than their male collaborators, or indeed been the only woman in a room full of men. Ironically enough, “there is a huge benefit to being the only woman in the room,” Ely said, “because you’re the only one who can offer that perspective.”

“There is a weight to it,” she added.

Rachel Bernstein added that EA’s policy was to assess why the audience for a given game as a whole found a game engaging, and used that research to inform their design choices, rather than segregating the data along gender lines. the fact that female employees bring a different perspective to that process is understood and encouraged.

“EA understands that we’ll make more, better, and more profitable games with more women in the company,” Bernstein said.

Allison Rynak agreed, noting that even in the case of some GSN games that provide a real-world payout to players, some of her male colleagues assumed that the attraction of such a game was “the adrenaline and the competition,” but that for many female players, the games were about “relaxation and having a little me time.”

All this isn’t to say that things haven’t changed for the better over the years. Bernstein told the story of her first pregnancy, which came while she was working as an independent developer under contract with a big publisher. Concerned that her pregnancy might scare off the publisher, who would fear that her maternity leave would cause delays, she would disguise herself as much fatter than she actual was when she went into face-to-face meetings, wearing oversized clothes and hunching over to make her baby bump look like a gut.

“I would ask my friends, ‘Fat or pregnant? Fat or pregnant?’” Bernstein said, smiling. “And if they said ‘pregnant,’ I’d change my stance.”

By the time her second pregnancy came along, Bernstein decided to abandon the disguise.

Rynak even detailed being the first person at her company to require a maternity leave at all and helping to shape the HR policy that would affect all female employees there in the future.

Will more women find their way into the industry? Bernstein drew a comparison between the effects of Title IX on women playing sports and the growing number of women with a passion for games. When she was child, Bernstein said that, “You were either a tomboy, or a girly girl.” Now, the executive producer at Maxis described taking her children to soccer practice and seeing a girls team all in pink and “even little pink Nike swooshes on their shoes,” who were still “girly” but able to enjoy their passion for the game.

“As more girls grow up playing these games,” said Bernstein, “they’ll think ‘I can make these games!’”

Slowly but surely, that change seems to be taking hold.