While I like to play video games, I don't always like the uber-violent aspect of many of them. I sure as heck don't want my daughter growing up on games like that. The solution? More women game designers!!!
From the article:
To design these games women have to become computer scientists. Yes, they have to enter a field, which has increasingly been dominated by men, and it's getting worse, not better. While enrollment in math, science and even engineering has been growing for women, computer science is moving the other way. In 1985, 38 percent of computer scientists were women. That figure has plummeted to 17 percent in some years.
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Why Girls Should Create Video Games
Why is computer science a good field for women? For one thing, that's where the jobs are, and for another, the pay is better than for many jobs, and finally, it's easier to combine career and family. …
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"In 1985, 38 percent of computer scientists were women. That figure has plummeted to 17 percent in some years."
I blame Snooki -_-
Me too +Mark Secare, me too…. (I am a born & raised Jersey Girl)
If my daughter was creating video games they'd still be pretty violent. That's one of her favorite aspects of them. However, she would have controls in the game to prevent bullying by other players on online games.
tu deffends toujours les filles amie lynette
That's assuming women's mentality to interests and entertainment choices are in line with societal conformity.
I'd love to see more women game designers. I think we'd see a lot more innovative ways of adding interaction into environments, and more diverse character representations.
Perhaps the reason is that women tend to prefer more social games while men prefer more graphic intensive games. Programmers tend to be less social creatures leaving a large gap for creation of social games.
So it is agreed that the woman is objectively more socially ideal than the male.
Not sure what "socially ideal" means, but I would agree that women tend to be more empathetic, giving them a different perspective into relationships then men. Neither perspective is more or less valid, but seeing as how we have had a lack of the female perspective, it certainly would help to balance things out.
Greater in social qualities than the other. But I see your view.
Yes! There was of course the legendary Roberta Williams of Sierra Online, but not many since.
But here's a question: A very common trait of video games, and arguably a reason for their huge success, is that they abstract and channel the human need to compete and prevail over one's opponents, in a safe and sometimes constructive way.
How male is that? Would you expect women designers to design to other needs, or put a feminine interpretation on this need?
+Pavlos Papageorgiou if you are implying women are not competitive you aren't paying close enough attention 🙂
Well, the idea is that women designers would design something differently. I wonder what, if anything.
One might expect women to design more nurturing characters and environments: More guild leaders, fewer lone wolves. More building, less zero-sum competing. Perhaps more open-ended outcomes, fewer situations with set winning rules.
I'd love to see more of these qualities, and I think of them as feminine qualities but that's just stereotypical I guess.
My view is that Earth's ancient history included a matriarchal system and they screwed it up so that's why we have it male dominated now?
you don't really have to have a CS degree to make games… (i don't!) in fact, most CS programs kill the passion for making games. typically, you walk out with a CS degree and you're stuck in an enterprise job at google or elsewhere… no time for games.
It doesn't indeed take computer science to create good games. +Lynette Young you may want to have a look at App Inventor, formerly by Google and currently managed by MIT, which is a visual development environment for creating Android apps. It was explicitly designed for teaching programming to non programmers of all ages, and many of its users create games. MIT is working on a community site for sharing apps (currently in closed Beta), and it is now possible to publish apps to Android Play Store. See:
http://www.appinventor.mit.edu
http://appinventor.mit.edu/about (about App Inventor)
http://appinventor.mit.edu/learn (tutorials and documentation)