Promotion
August 24, 2005 04:54 AM

I recently came across an interesting editorial on the "Women In Games" movement, hosted on a fairly standard "gamez and cheatz" type site. Considering its context (just looking over the comments, one cringes), the piece did a pretty good job of outlining some of the key issues faced by women in games, and groups like the WIGD community.

In my experience, people have a series of natural reactions to discriminatory environments and behavior. There's the overwhelming sense of frustration ("They're doing it again!"), then damnation ("They're doing it on purpose! Bad them!"), often followed by self-imposed isolation ("Let's go do our thing somewhere else - far away from THEM!") or litigation ("If there are rules about it, we can punish THEM!").

While these steps are crucial for establishing goals, laying out boundaries, and rallying the community to push on those boundaries - they are only the beginning. To grow and diversify our efforts, we need to look beyond us/them and "me too" stances. Yet little of the copy written about the games/diversity debate actually susses out concrete, actionable steps.

Of course, setting the agenda for an entire "movement" is pretty daunting. So, instead of working to define what "women in games" want or should go for - why not better define ourselves?

To clarify: in addition to your participation in meetings, mailing lists and engagements where diversity issues are the focus, why not actively showcase your role within the development community? This can happen casually amongst colleagues, with friends and strangers you meet in your travels, or publicly - perhaps by speaking at a local high school's career day, or submitting a presentation proposal to conferences in your discipline or area.

I'm not suggesting you carry a resume in your purse, or spout off your latest accomplishments ad nauseum. But talking about the problems you face (and solve!) every day is a pretty good way to "normalize" people's perceptions of what women working on (or studying) games actually do. It improves our overall visibility, while focusing the dialog on our contributions (as opposed to our feelings about marketing messages in game advertisements, violent content, or workplace harassment and discrimination). Stepping up when the first kind of talk is ignored in favor of the second, is also important.

While there are still plenty of things we can (and will) do as a group to highlight diversity issues and paths that lead our industry towards change - a little bit of bragging about the things *you're* doing could go a long way.

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