Okay. I've had a day. I've slept. Let's have this conversation.

Toxic industry cultures exist because "good" men in the game industry give permission through silence to toxic men to be gross around them because it doesn't effect them. This emboldens toxic men to push the line. Sometimes, if the toxic men have enough cultural weight at the studio, they can even get well meaning men who don't speak up to join them. To warp their own views. And once that happens, once those jokes and comments become the norm, so too do the ideologies that come with them.

In honor of IWD, I want to talk about the history of women in game dev, where the perception of games being for men came from, and what parts of that history are still with us today!

Not a historian, but used to be an academic! Follow along for some fun times! First things first, women have always been at the beginning of tech. Ada Lovelace figured out computer programming before there were computers. When computers took up entire rooms, women were the ones expected to run them. Games are no exception.

Kay. So I'm gonna rebutt this, because I really *really* dislike people treating whether higher ed is "worth it" as a monolithic yes/no, when the value of a degree varies wildly depending on the circumstances. I'm in debt for more than 80K, and I would do it again. A 🧵 :

https://twitter.com/Game_Dev_Carto/status/1356725645254946816

First off, I earned an MFA of game design and criticism at the Game Center, a school inside NYU's Tisch program of the arts. I got employed full time within 5 months of graduating, had contract work within 2.

Being a Game Dev with a Chronic Illness is nearly impossible and that's a fucking problem: A Thread Every time I read an article about XYZ game company's terrible work practices, the first thing I think is "If I worked there, I would literally need hospitalization or I might die."