Some sort of thread about women in Gamedev (and an office party)

From Google. Second definition. I'm most likely stretching the definition but to me it's a ritual.

Some synonyms of ritual.

Isn't that normal for some of the more lengthy discussions (eg game engine discussion) in this section of the forum?

 

Well, after spending some time dicking around reading this thread, I actually have to go put some food in the fridge now.

 

It's probably as dumb as some of the discussions that are common around here, yeah.

 

You have a point, and I see a lot of that. However, it's more than possible to have the desire to connect with someone emotionally in a deeper manner (to love) that involves intimacy. And intimacy is typically what people are talking about when they discuss marriage. By intimacy I don't only mean sex, but that's of course part of it.

 

I don't know if my way of thinking is correct. But first I'll say, women would contribute a lot. Except not purely on the basis of being women, but the fact they're freaking half the population.

And long story short, half the population contains a lot of amazing people. We want those people aboard ASAP

But why I'm not taking a purely feminist perspective?

My reasoning is that the larger the group you consider, the more you dilute those people's traits. "Men" and "Women" are absurdly large groups of people. So comparisons between men and women are by default extremely diluted.

Basically the tendency or trend ... is that differences between individuals are frequently more important than difference between greatly diluted averages.

Especially when it comes to creativity, notion aesthetics, intelligence, logic, which are characteristics very present in ALL human beings. And vary a lot from person to person.

I have no idea what the average of, say, creativity would be between men or women as political identities, and how they would compare ... (or between races, or tall or short people, pretty or ugly, hair color, religion, right or left handed, etc etc etc etc, etc ...There are as many differences and gaps as ways to divide society.

..but, for each group or division of people, there will always be a good amount of excepcional people, and we want the doors always open for them.

People are not the average characteristic of their political identities. The average does not define the individual. But all political identities have to offer incredibly great things.

All in all, the great problem of not doing everything in our power to welcome women into the gaming industry or any industry, is that we're missing out on a helluvalot of amazing artists, programmers, designers, sound artists, and so on.

 

SLAM!

 

There is also this pressure on women to excel at everything. Women are pressured to be in science, pressured to be in game development, our expectations of women in recent times have become unrealistic and this is causing a lot of stress that is not necessary.

So I don't feel it's right to see every female as an Atlas Telamon. After all a career is still a choice, and we are in danger of criticising people for choosing a profession that may be historically common but also enjoyable for the individual.

It's time everyone backed off from women and stopped focusing so hard on them. Women are only human.

 

I think this places far too much emphasis on work for finding a relationship. Many companies strictly prohibit relationships, or at the very least refuse to let people work together who are in one.

I used OKCupid. I dated a lot until I found someone that I really clicked with, and then we dated a while before moving in and, eventually, getting married.

This guy did, too. https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ The thing is, I maintain that in the end, it wasn't his math that succeeded, but that he went on a *lot* of dates. He met a lot of women and finally found one that he clicked with, and vice versa.

 

Use your brain for game development, but give it a rest for procreation.

Dogs, birds, snakes, beetles, giraffes, fish -- they all get along just fine and they're stupid as hell. Don't overthink this stuff. Just walk around, find a somebody that you like, and then straddle a tight rope between persistence and creepiness.

I found my wife at a dog park. At first, I wanted to hump her leg if I am being honest, but thankfully I restrained myself, unlike many of the mutts running around.

If you ask me, women are like cats. You have to gently entice them, and then go away. If they like you, they'll come on their own terms. But just like a hunter, don't give one call and then give up when she doesn't seem interested. Keep calling, but stay in your blind. Don't run out and try to snatch her. She won't like that, and neither will the police.



*Note: none of this is meant literally.

 

My post wasn't meant as an attack, or as a strawman argument, but was poorly written such that it looks like it.

I am a straight white male; my post is talking about my own personal experiences as a gamer and dev. I've gotten older I've become more aware of differences in the choices I (and many other white males I've worked with) make vs. what others who are not straight white males make, and I appreciate the benefit that diversity has had on those projects both in the way they subtly change the experience and help bring others into gaming.

When I say "it says more about the player than the game", that's not a statement of judgement, just that different people have different wants and interests. My wife, whom is not male, nor white, doesn't care at all about this kind of stuff when it comes to most games she plays. She's focused on the game design from an almost purely mechanical / numbers perspective. Story, cinematic events, revealing cleavage ... she doesn't care, she just wants to kill things faster. She'll then put that game down and pick up a romance novel or silly manga (not judging manga, specifically she likes reading manga with characters she describes as silly or kooky).

Diversity is good for any industry simply because it helps create stuff that appeals to a wider demographic. It might not help a specific game reach a wider audience, but it means we get things like "That Dragon, Cancer", Journey, Gone Home, Depression Quest, or Never Alone just to name a few that have been points of "main stream" gamer discussions in the past few years. These are games that would not exist without he injection of diversity of many kinds into our industry.

 

A lot of those games exist perfectly fine without any changes from the 80s, that is you didn't need the whole liberal diverse movement to make them, if only because they're achievable by anyone with a computer.

So I don't think you are making a good argument for diversity. I think your average diverse individual is far more similar to the so-called cis white male classic demographic than you think. Themes of violence, sex and comedy are themes of humanity, and that includes diversity.

The best argument (IMHO) for diversity hires is because you'd be missing out on some awesome talent, not hiring them because they're somehow supposed to bring something different to the table because they like to shag the same sex or are a different colour.

Speaking from my own experience of course.

 

If women or any minority group isn't well represented in a field like gaming, and investigation shows this to be due to unjust practices or systemic discrimination -- that's a problem. Injustice is always a problem, because when we allow injustice to others, we're going to burn in hell, okay? But seriously, treating any other person a certain way solely because of some discriminatory factor that they acquired by birth alone is disrespectful to them. Nobody wants to be babied. People want to be valued, and adults usually can tell the difference between being pandered to like a child or being a valued member of a team.

But if there isn't some force of evil/ignorance actively barring women/any group really from full participation in an industry, so be it. Let people do what they want and don't pressure them to do things they don't want. There's more white people in America than non-whites, so it makes sense that the white perspective would be more prevalent in media. That in itself is not an injustice.

Myself, as spoiled white male grown up consuming media, I am tired of the typical narratives you see and actively seek out alternative perspectives. In particular, I really admire non-civilized people wherever they still are across the globe, but of course these kinds of people aren't producing media.

 

This thread is hilariously out of scope for this forum.

 

Sometimes people need an office party.

 

I found my current wife while i was working as delivery driver, a 99% male dominated industry. She is not from work. Go out if you want girlfriend. Dance. I danced. So there's that.

Another subtopic which emerged from this question "is it good or bad to have low number of females in given industry", it is wrong question. Man have tendency to pick certain jobs, women have tendency to pick another type of work. Personal choices of individuals are the only thing responsible for such ratios, and thankfully we live in world ("we" as we in the West) where personal choices of individuals are the only things which drive ratios in any given industries. If you think some social engineering where women would somehow be forced in to industry is good thing, better think again. It would be tyranny. No one prevents women to go in male dominated industries, equally, no one prevents man to go in female dominated industries like medicine for example. There is no problem

 

But that's my point in a way. The office party at a games company with 90% men is not exactly the most exciting thing in the world. (Well for the men anyway). I know because I've been to one. 200 men in a restaurant making awkward conversation. So should a games company just cancel the Christmas party? Or my idea is that they should just hold a joint Christmas party with a different company.

I guess there is a similar situation on oil rigs and in submarines... and in prisons. (But sometimes in those cases they solve the problem in a different way...)

 

ITT people pretend sexism isn't a thing that exists.

 

The point of the office party isn't hook-ups.

If you have the will, there is a way. Just remember that women have the exact same issues, and there is just as many of them out there having the exact same issue as you. Try online dating, try out different social activities like gym classes or whatever, if you have balls made of stone like @Tom_Veg you can dance but I wouldnt recommend that for most white men unless you like to cultivate a funny guy image... the possibilities are endless. You just have to put in some effort.

 

What else are they for?

Seriously though. That's why I don't like office parties anyway. Party's IMO are to meet new people. So what's the point of having a party with people you see everyday.

 

If you think that the office party is a good place to find a life partner you should probably go outside more often.

Geez dude, they're for socializing with your co-workers. That doesn't mean you should try to smash. Do you have any female friends?

 

Funnily enough, I was just complaining with my wife about how office parties are a terrible injustice extroverts force upon introverts in a cruel attempt to make them feel bad for being the way they are.

But yeah, office parties, I think, are meant for people to get to know each other better and make the work environment a more friendly place.

 

Yes I agree with you. On the other hand I know quite a few people who've married people they met at an office party. So all I'm saying is that (*male) game developers are missing out on one avenue. Not that there aren't many other avenues.

Anyway we've established I need to get out more.

I appreciate that this conversation sounds very sexist. But its a fact of life that people marry and sometimes this happens with people at work.

 

lol...

Regardless, if anyone will laugh at you it would be other man. Jealous man. And their opinions are irrelevant.

 

Virtually all decent sized studios (especially here in the Valley) use open plan. No rooms, no offices. Everyone works next to each other on the floor. Depending on where the project is in development, seating will either be by discipline or more often by pods. Pods are groups working on the feature/aspect at a given time. Basically you sit closest to those you need to chat with most often, keeping cross-floor talk to a minimum.

But I wasn’t talking about “cliques”. I was talking about general outside interests. The art team will go out and do different things than the coders will. (QA folks throw the best parties) Being a tech artist (or game designer) we hang with both. (And have our own leet activities that exclude those dirty mono-skillers).

 

I like how this thread is tagged under 'business' ...should put 'legal' in it aswel followed by 'divorce' and 'cash and prizes'

 

I would say most of the females I know in the games industry, those whom are actively dating at least, explicitly seek out companionship from outside of their office. Often outside the games industry even. In office dating tends to be messy, because dating and relationships are messy. Bringing that mess back into the office can be hard for a lot of people to deal with well.

Many of the women I know in the industry aren't people who describe themselves as gamers. They enjoy the work, but don't necessarily enjoy the product or have a lot of interest in games outside of work hours. They have other hobbies, other interests besides gaming and don't necessarily want a partner who's main interest is what they do at work. I imagine the same is true for people from many industries; their day job isn't their whole life and they want to leave their work at work.


This is perhaps taking the discussion in yet another direction, but having a diverse set of interests is beneficial for many reasons, not just for dating. Just like diversity in the work place brings new ideas, so does your own diversity of interests. See the recent articles about Miyamoto intentionally not hiring gamers or his long history of finding new hobbies and translating those into new game ideas. Plus imagine if you find out you really enjoy something you never even thought about before?


Also realize an easy to find "gamer chick" is going to be someone who is fought over because they are perceived as rare. The rest of the female gamers out there are likely having just as many problems finding people to date too.

 

I would generally agree. Most married folks I know in the industry have partners outside of it. I have dated within the industry a couple of times and didn’t really work out. Mostly for those reasons, not enough diversity in conversation.

 

That's interesting because some companies do the reverse and actively try and recruit "gamers". (e.g. Riot Games who make League of Legends).

As a broad generalisation I've found that the artists are more inclined to have interests like gaming, comic books and manga etc. while programmers have more interests in technical things (robots?) and other interests and maybe not so into the "gamer/geek" culture. Which is probably not that surprising if you think about it. And testers like heavy metal. Some broad stereotypes for you!

TV tends to lump all these kinds of people into one. Like on The Big Bang Theory. It is unlikely that nobel prize winning physicists would hang around a comic book store or be dressing up as batman to go to comicon.

 

Riot has a unique culture, even within the games industry. All the “rioters” are also hardcore fans of the game. That is a key component of working there. (That and being pretty much top in your field).

 

But they do hang out in strip clubs and play the bongos.

 

Several western AAA game studios have a culture of requiring their employees to be massive fans of the game they're working on. Riot isn't totally unique in that regard. It has the added benefit of letting some big companies pay below the industry average because "just working here is a bonus!" I know of several companies that part of the interview process is asking very specific, esoteric questions about the game that has to be answered correctly to get the job. This isn't uncommon for designer roles, but these companies are asking these kinds of questions to everyone. Riot is just one of the few companies that are publicly open about that kind of thing.

Give it time. Nobel winners are usually older than the crowd that goes to cons. I suspect in a decade or two we'll have a few Nobel laureates who have been to a few comic conventions.

 

You have a strange idea of what constitutes a party!

 

It's still pretty unique compared to others. A lot of the big studios tend to have a lot of products, and while love of IP is certainly a bonus, the level of passion is different. Riot has the one big product. They do these events called "Riot Days" for other companies, where they take about 15 or staffers around to other companies, bring in computers, and spend all day coaching you on how to play LoL. Then as a wrap up they have a competition amongst the players, like they do at the big events, with commentators and play by plays. It is actually crazy fun. And the "coaches" are pretty wide ranging roles, the guy who coached me was tech-ops. There were engineers, designers, artists and producers. Surprisingly only one community type person. A couple of my friends eventually ended up as engineers at Riot (they were big LoL players long before). I have friends and colleagues at most of the big studios, and while they all have unique cultures to one degree or another, but few if any have the "gamer" type culture at Riot.

 

Easy, we hit with the game artist which are 90% women xD.

 

build robot
program neko maid ai
combine
done.

 

Uncanny valley lurve

 

Yeah. I've never watched it, but from what fellow scientists have told me that show is trash that doesn't represent science accurately at all. Don't take entertainment (dramatized entertainment) as your clue to how a demographic works

Kawaii desu > uncanny valley​

 

There is a lot takes assumption about why there is so few woman, but I like old cold fact, so I won't comment, and provide the first piece of evidence, there is more of course,but maybe we should discuss this:



.
Also I would like to know what is this "mysterious force" forcing women into "game, software and STEM" in general? As far as I know it's women on these field, who were in them for a long time, that are fending for themselves, not the illuminati or something. One reason is that having more women in the field designing tech for everyone ensure that tech is actually covering everyone's need, and there are many horror story you might have not heard if you aren't a specific group of person.

ALso I would like to see one men discuss his experience about menstruation and which is best between cups, tampons or pads. I mean there is experience you will never ever had, that's where perspective come from. BUt maybe listening is not a valuable skills after all?

Here is one amusing story to lighten up!
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/26/8661537/sally-ride-tampons
NASA thought Sally Ride needed 100 tampons for 1 week “just to be safe.” From what?

 

That's intriguing. As our society publicizes progressivism, less and less women are joining the industry (or more are leaving?).

So one has to ask if this progressivism is achieving what it's intended to (or what it purports to intend to) at all.

1984 and 2003 interest me.

 

At one level of abstraction this might be arguably true, but in all practicality it's misrepresenting the situation. In many cases "they didn't want that particular job" is a perfectly valid answer and is as far as you need to go, but lets not ignore the remainder of the cases.

It's important to ask why people might be less interested in a particular line of work. Unfortunately, in my experience, a very valid answer to that for women looking at software development is very much that it's a male dominated space where they're not generally treated well. There are exceptions, and there are those who don't care and will do it anyway. But if you think that our culture, habits, and treatment of people has no impact on the "personal choices of individuals" as to whether or not they're interested in working with us then you're deluding yourself.

For one of many possible examples, I once was at a site where the male-dominated engineering team had decommissioned the female toilet to instead use it as a server room. The minority of females could instead share the unisex disabled toilet instead. To be fair, space was tight and ladies in there were a minority. Still, they decided as a team that it was ok to compromise a basic necessity for the ladies so that the mostly-male team could have somewhere to stash more gear. (This is a harsh and potentially unfair spin, but a perfectly valid point of view.)

If you're a non-male looking for a job and you find out about that working environment (small town, so you probably would), which way do you think your "personal choice" about working there would go?

 

sample evidence 2, before 1986:


game ads after 1986:


Looks like "progressivism" is the reaction not the cause

 

I know this one will totally rock the apple cart, but transgender statistics do probably skew the results. For a start there are significantly more male to female trans, than there are female to male, and significantly, a large portion of the male to female trans were already into game development or are in game development.

Obviously this is just an observation but I think it probably does skew the number of counted females in this industry slightly. What this means is that we would probably consider it fair if there were slightly more females overall, than males, in our industry.

What I find confusing most of all, is that there's the assumption that there should be close to 50% as we can possibly muster. While it's offensive to assume men like to ruin their health sitting in front of a screen all day, it's probably a little bit true.

 

Hey that's me! no offense, my health is indeed ruined!

It used to be 100% at the beginning, that's why software has "soft" in it because yay the past was not woke!

 

Let's not make this thread about sex jokes but I get where you are coming from

 

But why isn't it having the effect one supposes it will? Why is it having the opposite effect?

Eh. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States) The most recent mention I can find is 1% of Americans identifying as transgender. Will that be higher or lower in the tech fields? Hard to say, but I'd also have a hard time believing that 1% is going to impact the whole very much.

 

But game development is a tiny industry compared to others, so 1% is quite large. If 1% is worldwide (no reason why it would not be) then that's 75000000 people who can be trans assuming there are 7.5 billion people in 2018.

Significantly more people than all the people in game development today.

Even the most conservative estimates would be expecting an observable amount of trans people working in the game industry.

That's a lot of diversity, but it illustrates how important it is not to get hung up on trying to reach equality numerically. It should instead be a totally uneven mess of creativity and hard work.

 

It's not having the opposite effect, it's the reaction of the downward trend, and there is many factors all who has been told many time over.

1986 is a turning point because one big event happen earlier, the crash of 1984, video games stopped being mainstream (for everyone hence ads targeting women too) to become "niche", therefore marketer started pushing boys as a market (remember the game boy?) and use aggressively sexist ads who repel women as a whole but play into boys aspirations, because when you go niche you use a narrower public to market more efficiently, that's business. It's also when home computer ads start targeting boys because of similarity of device.

Representation do matter, evidence 3:
http://news.psu.edu/story/276199/20...tion-do-women-dominate-field-forensic-science
Probing Question: Do women dominate the field of forensic science?

When you are trying to define your identity what is presented to you matter a lot, so that's why I showed ads, people in charge start eliminating women as simply as that.

Women being bad at computer is a mandela effect.

 

Why would games becoming non-mainstream push them towards boys and not girls, men and not women? That statement presupposes that females are "mainstream" while males are not.

 

Not that this is important, but I thought I should mention that yes there is 7.5 billion people on the earth, but I highly doubt 1% being transgender holds for the entire population. If 1% of americans are transgender, I doubt much of the rest of the world, especially the largest populations like India and China, also have a similar value. Probably more like .0001%.

Just my speculation, but besides the obvious state of the art medical needs for surgeries, transgender is also a phenomena of social progression, and last time I was in India it didn't exactly strike me as a progressive place in that regard. Never been to China or know any Chinese people really, though.