Every year at the Game Developers Conference, Eric Zimmerman stages a wonderful and engaging panel called “Game Design Challenge.” I’m not certain how far back this ritual goes, but one can pretty much rely on it as a perennial of the event. A few months back, people began to get wind that the Game Design Challenge for 2007 was going to be “Needle and Thread Interface,” a brilliant idea which everyone was looking forward to seeing played out. Here’s the dilemma: Eric has never invited a woman to this panel. This has become progressively more odd, especially when recent themes included “Romance” and Emily Dickenson poems. Cleary Zimmerman was trying to move towards a more gender balanced set of themes (and he has one of the better track records for designing gender-inclusive games), but it has never occurred to him, in spite of the fact the his very office contains one of the most brilliant game designers in our community, to ad an actual female, or “person of gender” as I like to call us, to the panel. Ever since my colleagues at Ludica, as well as other women we know, heard about these theme, we predicted that, once again, no person of gender would be represented among the luminaries on the panel. Monday night, at a dinner with contributors to the forthcoming book “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Combat” (Kafai et al, MIT, 2007), the topic arose once again. All present agreed that it was high time to say something.
Shortly before going into the panel, I ran into a Ph.D. student who I work with at Georgia Tech. She was very upset and told me that she and her boyfriend had just had a huge argument with two young men about women and games. These mean asserted that there were no women game designers, and that women were too hard to design for because they were too complicated. My student’s partner has been having a bit of a career crisis since his firm recently assigned him to design a mobile game for the restaurant chain “Hooters.” I’m not sure if there is a conscientious objector category for this sort of thing, but there ought to be.
The “gender issue” has haunted the halls of GDC for many years, even though, as I’m sure most of its attendants are unaware, the entire conference was actually co-founded by a woman, Brenda Laurel. I’ve had to deal with it my entire career, but it is truly alarming and upsetting when a whole new generation of designers, both male and female, are faced with precisely the kind of…to use an academic term…bullshit…that we have had to live with our entire lives. Now that I am a professor, I feel responsible for this next generation: I’ve resigned to the fact that I cannot expect to see a recognizable change during my lifetime, but I would just like to imagine the possibility of a tiny hint of progress in theirs.
I actually enjoyed the panel quite a bit. The challenge produced an interesting spectrum of approaches. David Jaffe began with his paper airplane game, in which you would create a real paper airplane with a stiff paper-like fabric, then sew along its folds in order to communicate to the computer what you had done. You would basically try iteratively to match the real plane with the virtual plane, which I thought was extremely interesting. Once this had been accomplished you could embellish your virtual plane by sewing on various features, including jet engines, and of course guns, all of which you could test for the capabilities. Finally, you would engage in contests with other players (which would include the ability to shoot at them). I would say this is the closest thing I’ve ever heard to a “trans-gendered” game. It starts out a girl, end slowly turns into a boy by the end.
The second contestant was Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris, I thought a good choice from a gender perspective as the creator of one of the most popular games among women. (An oft-heard comment from men during that period “We all know women love Tetris, but nobody knows why.” Answer: Try asking a woman!) Pajitnov came up with a casual came that entailed players sewing across the fabric perpendicular to each other from one side to the other. It reminded me a bit of the board game Bridges, where you build a series of Bridges across the board while trying to block the other player from doing the same in a perpendicular path. In Pajitnov’s game, the key was that the lines would eventually have to intersect, at which point one player would “die.” It was a little hard to make out any of the details, but the game seemed interesting and fun. This was the winning game in the competition, most likely because of it’s mathematical elegance and “classic” appeal.
The final game, by Harvey Smith, was by far my favorite, and I’m absolutely certain that a roomful of women would have voted it the best. After a somewhat protracted anatomy of his process, Smith arrived at a device that was sort of a cross between and embroidery hoop and a snowshoe, that one would rest on ones lap, in a living room, while seated on a sofa. (I loved that he thought through the context and even the posture of the players.) The game was a kind of story-rich Zelda-style adventure game called “The Tailor’s Daughter.” The basic game mechanic involved the daughter rescuing her father from an evil empire (whose antagonists bore a striking resemblance to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld) by way of her father’s “magic needle.” The examples of puzzles described were really enthralling. One was the ability to sew holes closed, which was a way to escape from enemies, but which also precluded going back through the hole after the escape. Another was sewing clothes that would help you in your quest, such as a pair of stealth socks. This game really captivated me; it follows the pattern of games like Zelda and Ico, which Ludica cited in the paper we recently submitted for DAC (“A Game of Ones Own,” which talks about games and space from a gender perspective.)
At the end of the panel, before the vote was taken, Eric opened it up for questions. The whole thing was incredibly awkward as I was in the far corner of the room. Nobody else rose from their seats as I marched pretty much the full length of the room in both directions to get to the mic.
I complimented the panelists, and commented on the variety of solutions and then addressed by question to Eric: “Considering that sewing has been the domain of females for hundreds of years, I’m curious as to why you didn’t invite any women to participate in this panel.” I was anticipating a hiss or a tomato thrown in my face, but instead there was a burst of applause, which, while not unanimous, was significantly higher than the percentage of women present. Since I was pretty sure I would faint at that point, I walked back to my corner for his answer, which was, frankly, ridiculous: “The panelists were selected through a process with CMP, and gender had nothing to do with it.”
Eric is one of the brightest and most articulate people I know, and this was arguably one of the lamest things I’ve ever heard him say. It also reminded me why I use the term “people of gender.” Apparently, according to Eric, and perhaps most of his GDC colleagues, as well as the staff at CMP, a significant number of whom are women, men don’t have a gender. I had a flashback to “The Second Sex,” and during the rest of the Q&A, I tried to keep myself calm by imagining a short story in which Simone De Beauvoir and Virginia Wolf are somehow sucked into a time vortex which results in them having to spend a week Game Developers Conference.
I also thought about the early suffragettes. A whole generation of feminists never go to see women get the vote, but the soldiered on regardless because they knew what they were struggling for was right. I am resigned that this point that even if I live to be a 100, it is highly unlikely that any of this is ever going to change. But I also realized that NONE of it is going to change if women are relegated to speak only on panels “about” gender, and other socially acceptable topics, but are consistently elbowed out of discussions on design. It is true there are not a lot of us, and I don’t think that will ever change. But just because we are small in size does not make us irrelevant. In fact, our relevance is disproportionate to our demographics: As the foremother of GDC, Brenda Laurel is 50% responsible for the entire event, regardless of the fact that 1-2% of the attendees are typically female.
I left the panel shortly before the vote, in part because I was verkelmpt and in part because I had failed to eat lunch and was extremely hungry. I was kind of freaking out because I was sure I had committed career suicide, but I also realized that it had to be done, and my doing it I was saving one of my sisters the nausea of having to go through that.
Afterwards I left a message for fellow Ludician Janine Fron, who could not make GDC this year. Within minutes I received a supportive e-mal reminding me that it was International Women’s Day.
When I got up this morning, knowing I wanted to blog about this, I did a quick search on Google to see if anyone else had beat me to it. Anticipating some kind of horrendous backlash, and that I would be a pariah, with perhaps a smattering of positive comments. It’s funny how we always make a bigger deal of things than anyone else. There were about a dozen posts I found on the panel. Only on of them mentioned my question within a list of other questions asked; I could not find a single critique by anyone else of this issue. In other words, nobody seemed to care. Which makes me feel both worse and better at the same time.
I feel like standing in the lobby of North Hall and singing “How Long, How Long.” It’s truly astonishing that in 2007, almost nothing has changed. We continue to be pushed to the margins to the point of irrelevance, in spite of the fact that, depending which genres you count, 40-60% of game players are now women. Which is remarkable considering how little we seem to matter.
Someone in the Indie Game Summit said that independent game designers do what they do not because they want to, but because they have to. I’ve been designing, studying and playing games since I was 21 years old. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. I’ve repeatedly put my head on the chopping block in academia as their champion. But the fact is, there is nothing else I will ever do, or want to do. I think it is safe to say that for women in the game design community, our passion is inversely proportional to our representation at GDC: we have to have 100 times the passion to put up with the nonsense we have endured year after endless year.
Image: A roomful of men listen to a panel full of men talk about a "Needle and Thread Interface" for games and fail to see the irony.
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