Women’s History Month: Women in Video Games
Written by GeekGirlCon Manager of Editorial Services Winter Downs.
Women in video games may seem like a relatively new phenomenon, given the coverage in recent years about girl gamers, “fake geek girls”, female representation in games and game development, and debates over what proportion of gamers are actually women. (According to some studies, as many as 52%.)
In fact, although it’s true that the industry has traditionally been dominated by men, women have always been involved, creating and co-creating some of the most influential games, game companies, and genres in the medium.
Carol Shaw poses with River Raid box, November 28, 1982.
Image Source: Vintage Computing.
The woman credited as being the first female game developer is Carol Shaw, who in 1978 designed the never-released game Polo for Atari. The following year, the company released her game 3D Tic-Tac-Toe for the Atari 2600. Her best-known game is probably one she designed while working at Activision–River Raid (1982), also for the Atari 2600.
In one rare interview, she describes growing up playing the very first arcade game (Computer Space) on trips to the miniature golf course. She was always drawn to engineering, eventually getting her Masters in Computer Science at Berkeley. She recalls her initial interview with Atari, when the President of the company, Ray Kassar, was excited to see her. “Oh, at last!” he said. “We have a female game designer. She can do cosmetics color matching and interior decorating cartridges!”
At the time, Shaw knew no other female game designers. She heard of one other woman working at Atari–Dona Bailey–but the two never met.
Promotional flyer for Centipede.
Image source: Wikipedia.
Bailey herself is renowned in the world of video games. In 1981, she and fellow Atari designer Ed Logg released the very first Centipede game. I don’t know about you, but that’s a game I’ve played in many versions on many different platforms over the years, from arcade to handheld to mobile. Most recently, Apple released a version for iPhone in 2008, and Centipede: Infestation was released for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011.
She talks about the pressure she experienced as the only woman at the company (after Carol Shaw left in 1980). “I think I was watched a lot more than I would have been,” she says. After the release of Centipede, things changed, “but I’m not sure it was for the better! There was a lot of surly attention after that. […] the typical kind of thing that people would say was, either it was a fluke or I didn’t really do it, somebody else did it.”
Bailey left the game industry after just two years. “It was kind of tough, though. […] I remember thinking, ‘I want to know what I’m like again, on my own, by myself without all of this around me.’” When she joined the company, there was a ratio of 30 male to 1 female developers; by the time she left, it was 120:1.
The experience was so alienating that Bailey had nothing to do with the game industry for two decades, though more recently she’s been the keynote speaker at the Women in Games International conference. Similarly, after Carol Shaw left the industry she didn’t give interviews for many years.
Roberta Williams.
Image source: Kiss My Bit.
One of my favorite game franchises as a kid was the fantasy adventure series King’s Quest. The first game was released in 1983, but I was a few years behind the times, so I only got my hands on it in about 1990 or so, by which time I could binge-play the first four games–at least until I got so frustrated by the ogre repeatedly eating me that I had to take a break!
I didn’t know it at the time, but the King’s Quest games were designed by one of the most famous and influential designers of the 1980s, who, it turns out, was a woman. Roberta Williams got her start designing games in 1980, and co-founded Sierra On-Line (later Sierra Entertainment) with her husband Ken.
Williams’ experiences were different from those of Carol Shaw and Dona Bailey. “No, I never experienced any problem with being a female in a so-called male-dominated field,” she says in one interview. “They were happy to have me. It was just really up to me to actually ‘put’ myself there.” Whatever the reasons for that, as a result, Williams’ career in video games spans two decades, and aside from the nine King’s Quest games, she’s known for The Dark Crystal and Phantasmagoria, among others.
It’s interesting to look back at the experiences of women in the game industry over the decades and see how many things have changed–and how many haven’t.
On one hand, we can look at the stories told by women such as Dona Bailey about having their achievements discounted and disbelieved, and making the decision to leave the industry so that they could be themselves again without all the pressure. Women still talk today about leaving the game industry (and indeed the tech industry as a whole) for reasons that include pressure, harassment, and lack of career advancement and support. In a Kotaku article, What It’s Like To Be A Woman Making Video Games, Whitney Hills says, “You feel lonely, you feel like a novelty, you feel like a fraud”–a sentiment that closely reflects how Dona Bailey felt when she left the industry in 1982.
On the other hand, the conversation about women’s roles and representation in game design, game narratives, and gaming has been taken up by many media outlets, from the niche gaming press like Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Kotaku, to the mainstream press like the BBC and CNN.
There are organizations to support women in game development, such as Women in Games International and the Women in Games group within the International Game Developers’ Association (IGDA). The Women in Games Jobs group exists to help women trying to get into the industry, or to network with others. Women in games have started social media campaigns such as #1ReasonWhy to highlight and push back against the problems they face.
As these stories show, women have been involved in gaming from the very beginning, and their influence is not going away.
