I believe change and growth are possible, absolutely. Every person, every company deserves a sincere chance at change.

But “it’s been several years” as a way to say “we’ve addressed all the cultural issue”? Nope.

Signed,
A Woman Who Has Watched This For 30 Years The real question: have you let a bunch of managers go and started good training for the rest?

I don’t mean obligatory sexual harassment training. We all know that just makes the perpetrators go snicker in the break room and talk Very Seriously on Slack about being oppressed.

Tales of women in game dev, chapter 14: I was reminded in a chat today that I was asked during at least 3 different E3s whether I played the game... that I was demoing at our booth... while wearing my badge that clearly read "Creative Director" or "Lead Designer" + company name. It was so bad one year that I bailed on the company "women's sweater" after 30 minutes on the floor and changed into the men's tee shirt. Wearing the women's sweater created a 75% chance I would be ignored and a 25% chance I would be asked to intro the press to a "real dev."

A key part of game design is connecting with and understanding your audience.

Who do we expect will spend money on this game?

That should be one of the first questions you ask yourself. It can come after a fun, simple prototype, but it ultimately shapes everything you design. Once you've figured out who you expect will spend money on your game, study those people like they were the first visitors of an alien species.

What other games do they play? What genres? Business models? Platforms?

What do they watch on TV? What movies and music do they love?

Every time industry horror stories start to surface, about the rude, sexist, awful and sometimes damaging and criminal ways women have sometimes been treated in game development and the game industry, it reopens a wound that never really heals in the first place. For some, it's the emotional and sometimes physical wound of what actually happened to them. When you read about someone else's experience, even if it's different from your own, it still feels the same because it brings up all the same emotions.

I often had folks in leadership roles in game development act like certain specialties were the kind of thing "anyone can do." As in, we won't spend money to hire for that role--"just have [insert other discipline] do it." For a long time, the "anyone can do it" expertise was design. There were many years where "designer" existed as a discipline but studios insisted game design was "just common sense" and "anyone on the team could do it."

For all but the simplest games, data structure is a vital part of design. It may seem like it's more of an engineering topic, but designers should always understand how their data is set up and how to edit it themselves. For example, as soon as you start designing the player's inventory and items, you should immediately think about how that's structured in data. Those are often two different types of structures.

Scoping is one of the toughest tasks in game/app design. How much is too much? How much do you need to succeed? If you're designing well, all your features will flow in and out of a core loop, so understanding what's in scope is critical. One technique I use is to find a comp--a game or app that has a similar set of features that you consider a good rough map for what you're trying to build. For example, if you were building a multiplayer word game, a comp might be Words with Friends.

Tip for women in tech:

You probably already do a quick scan of emails to look for typos and other mistakes.

Use that same time to edit out phrases that soften your points, excuse something that doesn't need to be excused, apologize when no apology is needed. Every circumstance is different. I'm not saying this is always the right course. Sometimes you SHOULD apologize or have "In my opinion..." in your email. These are just general tips.

All of that being said, here's a list of the sorts of things to watch for.

Everyone loves open-world RPGs, everyone wants to play more open-world RPGs, everyone wants to make more open-world RPGs, but no one wants to fund the time+people it takes to create the tools that make great open-world RPG content possible. Time after time, I see design teams blamed for content that fails to either scale or come together neatly when they had the equivalent of a few sticks and some mud as their tools to build that content.

Every time the question of whether women are "suited for" or "interested in" engineering comes up (and look, there it is again), I want to ask the pro-difference people: "Why do you care?" If the answer has anything to do with hiring initiatives, I already addressed that in a blog post on @gamasutra. Aggregate stats are meaningless when you're dealing with a segment already in the relevant group. gamasutra.com/blogs/LaralynM…

Over the past 4-5 years, I've seen a lot of experienced game devs--both men and women--dismiss the idea that we need to take an objective look at our work culture, and the way it welcomes (or discourages) diverse candidates. A lot of the resistance comes from devs who've been in the industry for 10+ years. It's easy to label that "defense of the status quo" but I think there's a bit more going on.