Women in Games – where are you?
“There’s a generation of men, and it usually is men,” begins the BBC’s Nick Owen in his intro to this piece about a West Midlands computer games event that happened a couple of weeks ago. His co-host Suzanne Verdee does a little nod as if in agreement about the inevitably of Nick’s statement.
I was at this event and actually it wasn’t all men, it was just men doing the presenting. I wasn’t surprised by that, having been to plenty of events like this over the years and in general there being a lot of men talking about the business of games. In fact the agenda for this event was meant to include Jude Ower of Digital 2.0.
Had she been able to make it I wonder if the BBC would have spun the story any differently? Or is entrepreneurship in the games industry so heavily situated as a male activity (“bedroom to boardroom” as Nick puts it in what might pass for a clever dig at the sexual politics of business but probably isn’t) that it’s a story that ‘writes itself’. A discourse so dominant that the media, particularly local media who never shy away from the chance to reinforce glib stereotypes, feel compelled to portray it that way.
The audience for that day actually had lots of women in it. Two were students of mine. One, a first year undergraduate animator having an initial stab at some business networking and the other one of my MA Social Media students. Vox-pops with them might have diluted the macho flavour of the final report. Indeed just some cutaways of the mixed audience would have been an idea.
It’s worth taking time to read Lorna Parson’s view on women-only networking events for her sector (construction/built environment). After attending an event she concludes: “why bother segregating?” but in the comments there’s a view amongst some that “we need organisations out there to promote and campaign for a better female presence.” Such an organisation in the Games sector might well have presented other case studies for the BBC to look at when they came to cover this event. I suspect Nick Owen might have had even more fun coming up with a lame intro gag.
It’s no redress to the Beeb’s take but here’s a video of Jude Ower talking about what she does. Any more female games entrepreneurs out there?
[Jude Ower, Digital 2.0 from Mr Nat Higginbottom on Vimeo.]
Additional Reading:
Alice Taylor’s response to the all-male Game Developer 50 list
Women in Games network (“Give a voice to women and men in the games industry and in games education with interests in supporting and encouraging the role of women in the games industry”)
Special Edition of the Digital Creativity Journal focusing on Women in Games.
Media Training North West research (from 2004) asking ‘Why are there so few women in Games?‘ (PDF)
Birmingham Science Park (location of the above event) showcases some new games start-ups.
Links for November 18th
Some links for you:
- Tall. Eats a lot. Talks too much. – Taking a baby to a tech conference (Nemi, to #openhacklondon) – Nice piece about taking the kids along to a hacking event.
- Screen WM – Setting the record straight – Jason Hall: "Did 4iP please everybody? Did it fit your own idea of what you thought 4iP should have been? No. Of course not. And it would be unrealistic to expect it to. But lets not use that as justification to stick the boot in or point out from the sidelines where you think it went wrong."
- Developers | Emma Mulqueeny – "Somewhere, somehow, here in the UK, amongst the rise of the Coalition and loss of the tech manifestos torn up in the aftermath of a hung Parliament an ethos has risen based on the fact that developers will solve all the problems that can be resolved through technology for free, for love."
Links for November 2nd through November 12th
Some links for you:
- Dave Harte: No help from the coalition – Business Columnists – Birmingham Post – Piece I wrote for the Birmingham Post this week on the government plans for a Silicon Valley in the East End.
- elearnspace › Questions I’m no Longer Asking – "I strive to strike a reasonable balance between reading blogs, books, and peer-reviewed articles. Different topics flair up in popularity (such as web 2.0 and now social media) and then fade. A few concepts have longevity such as “how effective is technology enhanced learning when contrasted with traditional classrooms?”. Questions like this are boring. And unanswerable given the tremendous number of variables involved in teaching online and in classrooms."
- DCMS Blog: A short history of the One-Armed Bandit – Articulating the mechanics of gambling as having a "place in popular heritage" – associates it with the seaside yet ignores the realities of grim high street slot machine arcades. DCMS seem to blogging a lot lately but first time I've noticed it done this way when announcing policy or consultation work.
Links for October 18th through November 1st
Some links for you:
- Talis Nodalities Magazine – About – "Talis has launched a magazine called Nodalities that bridges the divide between those building the Semantic Web and those interested in applying it to their business requirements."
- Libraries as gateways to the urban experience – Blog – Substrakt – "We've just received the latest copy of Panlibus, a publication we recently wrote an article for. Here it is…"
- Talis Platform – Future Events – "Interested in learning more about Linked Data, SPARQL and working with datasets from the BBC, UK Government, and others? Come join us at the Talis offices in Birmingham. Each day will include presentations on these and other topics, and a chance to work hands-on with public data. If you are prepared to come with questions and challenges for the team, we'll even throw in lunch. The day will run from 10.00am to 3.00pm"
- Digital Upheavals: Ethnographic studies on digital-DIY activity | UCA Research Online – "During life-change, relatively mundane use of technology becomes temporarily disrupted, creating a new period when users re-evaluate their use and location within the home."
- The Archivist By Mix Online – Save and analyse tweets or hastags.
Slides from Hello Business discussion
I thought it worth putting up the few slides I created for the session I was part of at the recent Hello Business event.
The discussion involved myself, Steve Harding from Birmingham City University (chairing), entrepreneur Michel Mol from Amsterdam and Jane Holmes from Advantage West Midlands (she does the inward investment stuff)
I’m not going to summarise the discussion which was wide-ranging and very useful other than to give some context to the diagrams in the later part of this presentation. They show the results of a workshop that I attended in Berlin earlier this year where representatives from a range of European cities mapped out the relationship between industry/trade bodies and creative and cultural policy-makers.
The last slide (from Berlin) seemed to have much clearer routes to enable industry to influence policy than any of the other cities. In Birmingham I’m not sure we have that and points were made about how some sectors (music for example) seem to lack a lobbying route to key City influencers.
One question from the audience asked about the role of culture in these structures and I related how in Birmingham, the fact Hello Digital is about the business end of digital rather than the culture end is testament to the fact that one lobby was more successful in making its case to policy-makers than another.
Paper on Advantage West Midlands’ Digital Media Cluster
During the summer the Business Cluster Opportunity Group that represents the Digital Media industry in the West Midlands asked me to produce a kind of positioning paper whilst the discussions were ongoing about the formation of Local Economic Partnerships (LEP).
The group was formed in 2003 so the paper is kind of saying: ‘don’t dump that knowledge, it might be useful’. It’s probably not a group that too many people have a wider awareness of but it actually did a lot of the strategic positioning work around placing ‘digital’ as a key focus in the region’s economic strategy.
It’s had a wide distribution via email to the various business/public sector bods who were doing the LEP lobbying but I suspect it’ll never get formally published anywhere so I thought I’d dump it on here.
An excerpt from the executive summary:
“In the current climate where business support policy is being reshaped and support mechanisms rethought, this paper strongly makes the case for those groups forming new partnerships to draw on the existing expertise of the West Midlands Digital Media Cluster Opportunity Group”
Digital Media Sector Cluster Paper 2010 Final
Paper in full (PDF).
Links for October 10th through October 15th
Some links for you:
- My paper to ECREA conference – further reading – theplan – Noted, useful list of Social Media or related academic papers
- National Police Web Managers Group: Communication Teams and the Public – "Having taken part in a session entitled 'Press Office vs Bloggers' at the recent #HyperWM event at Walsall College, and the 'Tweets' since the event, I have decided to write this blog to capture the issues and what can be learnt."
- Channel 4 axes 4iP | Media | guardian.co.uk – In the comments are some from people I know generally supporting 4iP. The article is interesting though, suggests that like many ideas, this one was suffered because it was too closely associated with a previous management regime, plus Channel 4's online remit now seems to be purely about increasing TV viewers.
Links for October 8th
Some links for you:
- The iterative development of 4ip | Screen WM – A look back on 4iP by Screen West Midlands as it gets subsumed into C4's general online commissioning structures.
- A Postmortem Look at Citywide WiFi by Eric Fraser – Why city wi-fi failed. Interesting glimpse also into how US telecommunications law helped kill it off in certain US cities.
- Digital partnerships – culture and business – Google Maps – Useful map of partnerships between business and cultural organisations. From Arts and Business