Recent G.I.R.L. blogs

Some recent posts I've written for SOE's G.I.R.L. blog:

G.I.R.L. Talk with Lesly Irwin

Fan Faire: It's All About the People

Joe "Rystall" Shoopack also followed up with some of the previous G.I.R.L. scholarship winners in this Summer Art Internships post.

G.I.R.L. blog Q&As

Over the past month or two I've been doing some little Q&A sessions with women who work in the computer game industry.  I've been lucky to talk to some very interesting and smart ladies, who took the time to answer questions about themselves, their jobs, and their opinions about women in gaming!  The goal of these little Q&A blogs is to demonstrate that there ARE plenty of women working in gaming, and highlight the many different roles that they can play within the industry.

Brenda Brathwaite - it's also well worth checking out her talk from GDC 2010

Sylvia Liu (our latest G.I.R.L. scholarship winner!)

Laralyn McWilliams

Terry Redfield

Also, the G.I.R.L. blog is now posting as a subcategory of the general SOE blog, instead of having a separate address of its own (all the SOE blogs have been consolidated at the one address for ease of finding them).  So, to find G.I.R.L. category posts at the new address, you can check here: http://stationblog.wordpress.com/category/girl/

G.I.R.L. blog: Catching up

Some of the G.I.R.L. blog posts I've written over the past few months, but may have missed linking to:

Should Barbie Be A Game Designer?

April Fool's Day Reflections

Thinking Pink?  Please Don't

The Grandmother Test

Risk Taking In The Bike Lanes

Happy Birthday, EverQuest II 

Q&A With Rebecca

Ada Lovelace

Apparently it's Ada Lovelace Day today.  I'd heard of Ada Lovelace, but the day was new to me, and it seems to be very new in general.  From what I've read, it was established last year to try and raise awareness of women in science and technical areas, and bloggers are encouraged to blog on this day about women in technology fields.  Almost 2000 people blogged last year on this day, and it's expected even more will do so this year.

Here's a brief blog I wrote for the SOE GIRL site:  Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

New Scientist (my favorite science magazine) marked the day with:  Celebrating Women in Science.

And, a friend and former guildmate of mine, Paul Fenwick, flattered me greatly by actually including me in the list on his own blog for Ada Lovelace Day.

I've been a woman in technology for most of my life I suppose, depending how you count it.  My dad is a physicist and engineer, so I was raised in a scientifically friendly environment and encouraged strongly to study the sciences.  I think he was very disappointed that I didn't show any interest in going into physics, but biology interested me far more, so off I went to the University of Toronto.

I had a couple of female professors in the biology department at UofT, although they were in the minority.  Verna Higgins was a good example to me as I finished up my degree, which ended up being a specialist Bachelor's of Science in Plant Pathology (the diseases of plants).  Studying plant pathology meant studying a lot of fungus, not a particularly glamorous life, but I did spend a couple of enjoyable summers working in the mycology labs growing plate after plate of Penicillium species.  It's interesting stuff.  Not really an area that women are rushing to get into; but then again, I'm not sure the men were particularly rushing in either.  Although women were in the minority, I wasn't the only female in my classes.

The B.Sc. was followed up by a Masters of Science at the University of East Anglia in England, mainly because they didn't have any job openings but they did have an unclaimed scholarship in my field.  But even with a M.Sc. now in hand I still had no prospects of a job.  I applied to numerous positions in science roles, but coincidentally, I happened to hear of a position in I.T. support at an entertainment company where a friend worked.  And eventually, I got that job in London.  At first it was just answering the helpdesk phones, but soon I was documenting instructions, helping to train new support technicians, and eventually programming databases also.  Once again, there were a couple of women in the department, but not very many.  There were several programmers working on the reporting and financial software, however, and they were very encouraging as I tried to learn more and expand my skills: Adelaide, Vanessa, and Natalie.

A promotion to be the email administrator for Latin America (and a relocation to Sao Paulo) followed, where I had the pleasure of hiring and working with our network administrator Cristiane Kadooka.  A native Brazilian, she worked incredibly hard to practice her English and was completely dedicated to everything related to our networks.  She is still with the company, and several promotions later, is now based in Miami.

Another promotion for me and I was the I.T. Manager for Australia & New Zealand, based in Sydney and responsible for our offices in Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth.  Here, however, I was completely isolated from other women working in the same area as me.  The I.T. department consisted of just me and one (male) contractor for many years, and although the company itself was full of smart, competent women, this was still an entertainment company and their skills were mainly in marketing and promotions.  The only exception I can think of was Shainaz Tamrazians, a very smart and efficient lady with a background in economics, who inherited responsibility for much of the sales reporting.

Parting ways with that company after 9 years, I worked briefly as a database designer for a small company in North Sydney, in which the only other female being the receptionist.  I hadn't been there long before my current position beckoned, and I made the transition to game design and moved to San Diego.  Here I have had the pleasure of working with a number of very smart women in the industry.  Although there were at one point three female game designers and two assistant producers on the team, unfortunately three of those have moved on to other things (two still within the industry) so there are only the two of us permanent female content designers on the team now.  I'd love to see that ratio growing again.

Reading back over what I've written, I seem to be talking about myself an awful lot.  I didn't intend for this , post to be so much about myself, but it is meant to highlight some of the different areas of science and technology that I've seen personally, as well as some of the remarkable women I've met there.  There is no doubt in my mind that in pretty much any field of science or technology that you care to name there are women who are currently excelling in their field.  I look forward to the day though when there's no need to call them out separately.  I look forward to thinking of some of the "big names" in game design, and besides people like Sid Meier and Will Wright, the name of a woman will pop directly to mind also.  I look forward to when there will be no more need for these "most influential women in MMO development" type articles, just "most influential designers in MMO development" with a proportion of women in the list that's proportionate to women in the general population\.  There's no way I'd make it onto a list of "most influential designers in MMO development" right now.  But one day, I hope I do, and I very much hope I'm not the only one there with two X chromosomes.

G.I.R.L. blog: A Touch of Hero Worship

This week on SOE's GIRL blog I talked a little bit about Felicia Day, creator of the web series "The Guild":

A Touch of Hero Worship

What I didn't mention (as it wasn't quite finished when I actually wrote the post) was that I decided to dress as Felicia Day's character Codex from "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar" for Halloween this year.

And to do that, required a little bit of Real Life tradeskilling.

Fortunately, out of all the costumes from The Guild, Codex's looked to be the simplest to make.

Unfortunately, I'm really not that good at sewing things and can only plod along at the most basic level! I do have a sewing machine now (it was a Christmas present last year) but all I've made with it so far has been a small quilt, some curtains for the house, and some linings for bags I've crocheted. This was a step beyond that!

Still, I picked up some fabric and a corset pattern, and a white bra to use as the foundation of the dress, and learned a lot.  Mostly, I learned why people charge $500 for corsets they sell online.  They are a pain to make, even with helpful tips from the lady at the fabric store!  (Best tip:  use the large size plastic cable ties from Home Depot instead of commercial corset boning.  Much cheaper and generally stronger too!)

From this:

To this:

I broke 3 sewing machine needles in the process and ran out of time so the staff and accessories (like kneepads and bracers) are less detailed than I would like, but on the whole I'm pretty happy with it as a first attempt!  If I wear it again I may try to improve some of those details I didn't have time for this year.

(The Dr. Horrible lab coat was something I made last year.  We couldn't find a side-closing lab coat like Dr. Horrible's, so I converted a front-button one to a side-button one, added some details, and embroidered the little caduceus logo on the pocket - that caduceus along took almost 3 hours!)

The funniest observation came from "Dr. Horrible" as Halloween approached and I was madly trying to finish up the sewing.

"Are you going to dye your hair too?" he asked (since Codex/Felicia Day is in fact a redhead).

"Good grief no, that's way too much effort," was my immediate reflexive response.  At which he just looked at me for a moment and then pointed out that relative to the weeks of sewing effort I'd already put into the thing, dyeing hair really wasn't much effort at all.  And I had to laugh at myself a bit because it was very true.

Nonetheless I did not dye my hair. Probably because making the costume was interesting and a tradeskill challenge; dyeing hair is a nuisance and smelly and not fun at all.  You gotta draw a line somewhere, after all!

Anyway, as I said in the GIRL blog post, Felicia Day is a pretty impressive lady and a great role model for girls in gaming (for anybody, in fact).  If you haven't yet watched The Guild, visit their site, find season 1, and get started.  Episodes are very short, generally 3-7 minutes, and if you've ever played any MMO I guarantee you'll find it hilarious.  You can also buy the DVD now and support a great independently produced show.  And incidentally, I was not paid to say any of this ... it's just true.  So go do it.  =)

Ratios

Fall is here, and so is a wealth of new computer games! My significant other has just finished Uncharted II and is currently engrossed in Borderlands, and I've been playing with the superhero themed Champions Online, and the beautiful Asian influenced Aion.

Both games have surprised me in different ways, both good and bad. I'll leave comments about Aion to a different post, just noting that I'm actually enjoying it very much, and finding it surprisingly more captivating than I had expected. And I'll restrain myself from talking too much about Champions Online too, various existing reviews and blogs pretty much sum up my experiences. But I did want to comment on one thing about Champions Online that I haven't seen anybody else mention, and that's the population ratio.

What do I mean by the population ratio? In this case, I'm specifically referring to the ratio of males to females in the NPC population of the world. (Obviously, the ratio of male to female player characters is much harder for the dev team to influence.) Yes, it took me about 2 weeks to notice it, but there are almost no women NPCs in Champions Online's earlier zones at all. (Possibly there aren't any in the higher level zones either, but as the game was so broken that I gave up before getting there, I won't comment on those.)

Champions Online has a little newbie tutorial that takes you through the very basics, and then spits you out in one of two huge overland destinations: an arid American desert, or a snowy wasteland in Canada. In the desert, old nuclear tests have created a population of ferocious mutants who recently seem to be organizing for a concerted attack on the defending US soldiers' base. And in Canada, the Canadian soldiers are defending the area against an uprising of hunter-patriot revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the current power structures (or, in fact, killing anything in sight). Both zones are enormous and have enough content to carry you through a dozen or more levels.

What I eventually came to notice, however, was that none of the forces on either side of these fights were female. Despite the fact that there are no restrictions on what roles women can fill in the Canadian military, not a single soldier NPC in the Canada zone is female -- and the one single supervillain who seemed to be assisting the hunter-patriot rebels was written as a ditzy valley-girl with voiceover lines including "I never wanted to be a supervillain. But surgeries to turn someone into a cat-girl don't come cheap!" and "I'm not really a supervillain, I'm just a 'furry'who fell in with the wrong crowd." Likewise, not a single member of the US forces in the desert zone is a female, and nor is a single one of the mutants they are fighting, nor are any of the ghosts in the nearby ghost town.

Delving further into this mystery, I discovered that not only are none of the military NPCs female, but female players are actually not even given the military chest costume options in the character creator. Males get a couple of options called "military"; they're totally missing from the available female options.

Although there are a few token female NPCs such as questgivers and trainers, and a grand total of two female supervillains that I saw, overall the attackable NPC population in the first 20+ levels of the game has got to be over 95% male. Females are mainly 'flavour' type NPCs, background characters or victims asking for help or questgivers/trainers. It struck me as extremely strange when I noticed this, and it makes me speculate on how this could have happened. I could think of two possibilities:

• It's possible that this was a deliberate design decision, mandated during the planning. "Let's make the world population heavily male." Why they would do this, I have no idea, but it could have been a case of "we're not happy with allowing our players to slaughter women, even if they are NPCs". It could even have been a case of "there's something horribly wrong with the art for our female models, so let's just populate all our zones with the males for now so we can test it, and we can switch in some females later" (which nobody then remembered to do later). Whatever the reason though, it could have been a decision mandated from On High.
• It could be a coincidence. Perhaps two different designers (or teams of designers) were told to create the two big overland zones, and they independently failed to include any women. It wasn't a grand design decision from on high, but maybe both designers, being male, just thoughtlessly assumed that all soldiers are male and populated their zones accordingly, and nobody even noticed.

Either way, it seems to be a rather unfortunate outcome. As a female player, I feel that the lack of 'military' costume options (and yes, I did want to create a character using one, which is how I noticed the lack) is very disappointing. And more importantly, unintentional or not, I feel that the game's population is sending a rather negative message about how the dev team perceives the role of women in their world. Sure, the majority of their players are probably male, and sure, the majority of soldiers, rebels, and (theoretically) mutants in the real world may be male, but there are still female players (like me) and there are many female soldiers (and rebels) who have made unimaginable sacrifices throughout history for the causes they believe in, and in my view it seems the game is simply ignoring this entirely, which seems somewhat belittling, at best. And specific to the uniforms, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems the simplest design decision would be to just make a standard set of chest uniform options and then apply them to both genders unless there was a specific reason not to. And with most of the costume options it seems this is indeed the case. The military chest option is definitely not a graphically complex choice. It would therefore seem to have required a conscious decision to remove the military options from the female gender, and this makes me curious. Specifically, it makes me want to ask, "why are you intentionally limiting me?"

Since noticing this about Champions Online I've been extra aware of what I'm doing with my own population in EverQuest II; I'm currently creating some tradeskill quest lines, and I find myself checking that I haven't made too many females compared to males, or the reverse. On the whole I can't think of any great imbalance in EverQuest II, but it's easy to be influenced by your own prejudices without even realizing it.

I wonder how many other games suffer a similar bias, and nobody's even noticed?

G.I.R.L. blog: Adventures in D&D

Another G.I.R.L. blog is up, this time it's my aged maundering about the trials of being a girl with a D&D Players Handbook.

Adventures in Dungeons and Dragons

Yeah, this is the cover I remember! =)

G.I.R.L. blog: What's In A Name?

A little pondering about naming quest NPCs, and just how DID some of those characters get their names anyway ...

What's In A Name?

G.I.R.L. blog: My First Multiplayer Game

A little bit of "good old days" remininscence for my birthday on the G.I.R.L. blog:

My First Multiplayer Game

Also for my birthday BBQ, I made a (rather lazy) version of the cake from Portal:

Not quite as good as the version I made a year or two ago for a friend at work (below), but I didn't have a lot of time this weekend.

This weekend's cake was just a regular white cake, with orange chocolate buttercream icing and covered in mini chocolate chips. The cake tasted ok but was a little dry, it was just a random recipe I pulled up which I hadn't tried before. Might need to look around for a better vanilla cake recipe if I make one again. Oh well, still tasted ok and the BBQ part was delicious too!

G.I.R.L. blog: Character Creation

A new GIRL post is up today:

Character Creation

Enjoy!

G.I.R.L. blog updates

Couple more of my G.I.R.L. blogs have been posted. Yeah, I suck at thinking up clever blog titles!

A Goo-d Game

I'm not as weird as you think I am ...

G.I.R.L. Blog updates

My first few posts on the G.I.R.L. blog are now up:

And so it begins again...

A busy weekend in San Diego

The tales we tell

Real life got suddenly busy lately so I've been a bit slow updating this blog, but I hope to be back to a more regular schedule soon. The idea is to talk about crafting stuff (both game and RL) here, and general women and gaming thoughts over there.

For those who play EQ2, you might want to check out the discussion thread on the SOE forums for proposed upcoming changes to the transmuting system. I was a little scared when I checked back on it after half a day and saw it was already up to 5 pages, but responses actually seem to be very positive, which is great to see (not to mention somewhat unusual)! =)

Old news

I first saw this news when Cuppycake pointed it out on Ars Technica yesterday, which makes it old news by game industry standards, but I think it's important enough to call out in multiple places so I will repeat it here anyway.

EA puts sexual bounty on the heads of its own booth babes

To sum up: EA is advertising a contest that actively encourages contestants to "perform acts of lust" with their, or in fact any, booth babes at ComicCon. The prize: a night out with two of the booth babes where, presumably, you can harass them further still.

I really can't put it any better than Jeremy Preacher:

I understand that absymally stupid ideas get floated in meetings all the time, but at a billion-dollar company like EA, you'd think SOMEONE would have the basic common sense to put a stop to a FUCKING CONTEST TO SEE WHO CAN HARASS YOUR EMPLOYEES THE MOST.

The EA booth babes may be contractually obligated to put up with this and unable to protest, but I certainly hope that every other company whose booth babes are harassed due to this contest sues the pants off EA.

While this particular contest is in fact fairly new news, this kind of attitude within the game industry is unfortunately pretty old news. It's disappointing to find it still in 2009, but alas, there's no shortage of it, as io9 highlighted recently. There are a number of organizations within the game industry (such as WIGI) who do try to raise awareness of women in gaming, but it sometimes seems like an uphill battle when a company like EA comes out with a contest like this one.

Another such organization is "Gamers In Real Life" which is organized by my employer, Sony Online Entertainment, and aims to raise awareness about women and the portrayal of women in games and the gaming industry. G.I.R.L. also maintain a blog which was previously written by the inestimable Tracy "Owlchick" Seamster, and which I will be taking over starting in August now that Tracy has moved on to pursue other career opportunities. As this weekend's EA news demonstrates, there is still a long way to go before it will be unthinkable to promote a contest like this one, but slowly and in increasing numbers we will get there. I'll keep updating this blog also, but you'll soon be seeing me on the G.I.R.L blog too. =)

Updates:

Opinion and perspective from a booth babe

Comment from one of the winners (who declined the prize)

And a statement from EA = pretty much a non-response and apparent total fail at comprehending the issue. Does "sorry you don't understand" count as an apology? Not really, no.