Women Game Developers

So, I went to 3D camp on October 5th and it was pretty awesome! I was on the game development panel with Eric Kinkead, Nathan Eror, and Jason Bunn, moderated by Mckee Frazior (formerly of Bouncing Pixel where I work). It was my first time on a panel, and I think it went rather well!

Some high school girls came up to me after my talk and asked me some questions about the difficulties I may have faced being a woman in game development. I remember last year hearing about the #1reasonwhy hashtag on Twitter and all the awareness it raised about the issue. I keep thinking about this so I figure I should write about it too.

I guess I'm lucky in that in my own experience I haven't really noticed that much overt sexism from the people I have worked with in game development, or even my limited forays into online games. Whenever I've encountered insults of any kind online, I just shrug it off as a sign that the person making the insults is being immature and doesn't deserve my attention. (Though I have to say I would probably stoop to ridiculing them for their ignorance if anything.) My true friends would always see the value in my insights in game development, so I never perceived any truly antagonistic element to the game design world. I guess I have been blessed to have open-minded friends such as Lars Doucet and Sean Choate, as well as all the people I work with at Bouncing Pixel. I'm not really saying all this to brag, I'm just pointing out that there ARE good places out there, it's not all bad.

After the panel at 3D Camp, Mckee pointed out that sometimes companies will use the excuse of "not a good fit for the corporate culture" to avoid hiring women, which made me wonder about whether I have encountered invisible forms of discrimination. I do find I have a hard time being taken seriously sometimes. I feel like I have to prove my skills more frequently than most guys would, but then I can't really say from experience because I have never been a guy. My philosophy is to just be who I am and not stress about what people think of me.

I think being a woman in game development is kind of like being a human on Earth, you have a good chance of having a hard time of it, but there are ways to get by. Is it worth it to be a woman in game development? I don't know, that's up to you! If you are a woman and really want to be a game developer despite all the obstacles, GO FOR IT! That's what I did. Does the industry need to change? Probably! Lots of things in the world need to change. Everyone should do what they can to right injustice wherever they perceive it. I'm glad the #1reasonwhy Twitter cascade brought awareness to the problems many women face.

If you are a woman in game development, don't let the male-dominated culture intimidate you. If you truly want to change the world through game design, or even just make fun little games to brighten people's day, the world has a place for you, whoever you are.

But don't be fooled, it's a difficult industry to survive in, whether you are a woman or not. Jobs can be very hard to find at times, and you may have to fall back on other skills you've developed to get by. But keep your vision alive, and keep striving for it. Spend time to perfect your skills and learn about the trade. Confidence in your abilities is one of the most important traits to have, and it is best acquired through practice.

People have asked me before if being the only woman working in my office (of 7 people) is lonely. I have never seen it that way. I feel like a pioneer, an adventurer. The life of the early pioneers seems like it would have been pretty lonely at times, but was it worth it? You bet. You don't make any progress by staying in your comfort zone, and I've found that life is a lot more fun when it's challenging.

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I give thanks to God for giving me the confidence to go against the current, the calling to rise above the world and all its prejudices and injustices, the assurance that Someone loves me no matter what anyone else may say, and the resources to achieve what I have today. Without Him, I am nothing. Glory to God for all things.

Gamification

Hearing all the talk about this newfangled term "Gamification" reminds me I need to get back to writing about game design on my blog. And by "back to" I guess I mean "start."

Somebody asked me what I could do to make some educational software more game-like. The software was already interactive, so the first things I thought of were:

1. It needs a story, some narrative to tie all the elements together.
2. It needs art. Games are very object-oriented and action-oriented experiences.

But when I looked more into what other people meant by "gamification" I was mystified by the response. It seemed to me most people were talking about adding extraneous achievements and pointless points. Ian Bogost called it "exploitationware," and I tend to agree.

Plenty of people have talked about this aspect of the fad, so I won't get into that. Rather, I will point out that the things I noticed that make games more compelling aren't always in people's definition of a game. I've tried to do things like Fitocracy and others to increase my motivation, but it just doesn't stick, so I started wondering why. A sport can be a game, but doesn't have a story. Chess is a game that can have good aesthetics but a very abstract story at best. But for me, those games don't really pique my interest for their own sake. I realized that the thing that gets me to pick up a game more than anything else is the story; if it's a sport or other multiplayer game, that story is built on the relationships and interactions of the players.

I've also noticed that I am no longer interested in an innovative gameplay mechanic. That used to be all we talked about in college, making something new, something no one had done before. But video games are about the whole experience, something that lots of indie game developers can lose sight of quickly. This is what made classics like Ico so inspiring. Someone I met recently pointed out that story is what gets people to pick up the game, and gameplay is what makes them stay. While I'm not sure how true that is (WoW continues to have a lot of people sticking with the same old gameplay by adding new story modules), there's one thing for sure: Story in video games is important, if not THE crucial element to a successful game.

My first landing

Chuck was in the back of the plane, and Russell was in front instructing me on how to land. We were going to land at West Houston Airport, and it would be my first landing! Russell coached me through the process as we approached the airport. In the traffic pattern, both Chuck and Russell were giving me instructions about various things I needed to fix.

I made all the turns, and was on final approach. Well, by that point, you either got it or you don't, it's not the time for further instruction. But they were still trying to give me pointers!
"No, don't flare too high"
"Watch your airspeed"
"You have to slowly pull back"
Enough, I thought. "Everyone be quiet! I'm trying to land an airplane!"

And they were quiet, as I concentrated. And I landed, and everything was awesome. My first landing! Phew, that was over. (Russell probably had to help me a bit at the controls, but I don't remember.)

Funny that I had to tell my instructors to be quiet, as if they didn't know that it took concentration!

How I Lost the Runway

Every pilot at some point has a really embarrassing story, right? That's how they come up with callsigns. Well, here is how I almost got mine, sooner than I expected.

It had been a rainy day, I encountered a fierce storm on my way to the airport, at the same location we were planning to fly to. But by the time I got to the airport, things were clearing up. We were going to go out and practice landings at a rural airport, and there weren't too many other planes around because of the stormy sky.

The air was nice and calm on the way over there. It was a few hours before sunset but darker than usual because of the cloud cover. I wasn't familiar with the area, so my instructor, Chuck, pointed out the airstrip, and we approached to enter on the downwind leg of the traffic pattern. As I turned to final, I could see I was not aligned with the runway at all, so I decided to go around. I made my announcement on the radio and opened the throttle, raised the flaps, etc.

Well I was fairly new to using the radio, and still timid. It was still hard to remember the things I was supposed to say when, or even remember what to call my aircraft on the radio. As we climbed back to the traffic pattern, I looked behind me to see if I was finally lined up with the runway... and couldn't see it at all. Now, maybe the land was the same darkness as the runway since the clouds blotted out all the sunlight, but I really couldn't tell where it was. But I had just been over it 2 seconds ago!

Still amazed by this fact, it was time to turn to the crosswind leg of the pattern. I keyed the mic to announce my turn, but instead of doing that, I said "How did I LOSE the RUNWAY!?" I looked over at Chuck, expecting an answer, and saw the shocked and amused look on his face. I looked down at my thumb, which was still on the push-to-talk button, and quickly removed it. Something had gone wrong, but I couldn't exactly place it.

"You just said that on the radio!" Chuck said, laughing. But I was still expecting him to explain how I had lost the runway. "Here, I'll show you." He finished turning the plane to the crosswind leg of the pattern, and it was right there out the window. Wow, I felt smart.

But wait, I had just said WHAT on the radio? Hadn't I made the radio announcement and THEN told him about losing the runway? Looking back moments before, I realized that is not what happened. I started to blush with embarrassment. "I just said that on the radio?"
"Your finger was on the push to talk button!" Chuck said.
"Well..." I said, trying to think of something to make it better, "but there's no one else here at the airport, so no one heard me, right?" I said with a hopeful smile.
Chuck just shook his head, "This frequency is used by several airports in the area, maybe they heard you."
"AUGH!! I don't want to talk on the radio anymore, you do it!!" I said, nearly relinquishing the controls, as embarrassment turned my face red.
"No, you're going to keep talking on the radio!" he said with a mischevious smile, not letting me escape from my duties.
"Fine!" I said indignantly, facing the seemingly endless opportunities for further embarrassment. Well I was going to do it right this time! I attempted to recover quickly, making my next radio comments sharp and exact, even though half the time I forgot what to say until the last moment. I was still flustered, but there were landings to be done, and I was still figuring out how to think about everything at once. I knew I couldn't let Chuck do the radio communications forever if I was ever to fly on my own.

We got back to our home airport in good time, after an otherwise uneventful though educational flight. No one ever responded to my unusual radio communication, but one thing is for sure: Chuck will never let me live it down!

The Learning Process

Some useful things I found while researching for my thesis. This is from The Myth of the Learning Machine by John M. Heaford, 1983. I'm focusing on Chapter 2.

The role of feedback in learning is the correction of mistakes. It does almost nothing for reinforcing positive behaviors, so it is not the technique for students approaching mastery, but for students just beginning. Studies have shown that immediate feedback is more effective than delayed feedback. Kulvahy and Yekovich created a model for student response to feedback on quizzes that goes something like this:

1) Study the material
2) Respond to question at initial confidence level
3) Obtain feedback
* Answer correct?
** Was initial confidence level high?
*** Yes: Do nothing.
*** No: Study item to increase understanding.
* Answer incorrect?
** Was initial confidence level high?
*** Yes: Look over material and locate source of error.
*** In both cases: Study item to correct error.

This is one reason why games are such good teaching tools. They provide immediate feedback, causing the player to start over again if he fails.

Equilibrioception

Or, "sense of balance" as Wikipedia calls it. I've been doing a little bit of experimentation. I know when I spin my chair around as fast as possible (until I reach a sort of "equilibrium" where I feel no acceleration, then stop, it takes a while for me to stop being dizzy, as would be expected. But I just recently realized that the sense of dizzyness is NOT due to my physical state (kinesthetic sense) because I can tell that I'm not moving. It's purely VISUAL. (And I'm kind of wondering if it's the same for other people.)

In the past, I realized that the feeling of which direction is "up" is not just a feeling but an actual visual perception. When you turn your head and look at a picture frame, you can still tell if it's on the wall crooked, even though your head is tilted. I had always wondered why when I tilted my head, my eyes were at an angle but it didn't seem like the world changed at all. Even when a person's body is at any angle, even upside-down, he or she is still able to tell whether something is upright or not. Clearly the visual is linked directly to the inner ear sense.

Well, when I was spinning on my chair the other day, I realized once I stopped that it seemed everything was at a DIAGONAL angle, and constantly looping visually (probably a result of trying to track the motion of the spinning visually prior to the stop). The angle gradually decreased until it finally looked level again, a process which took 15 seconds. I am guessing that it corresponds to the amount of fluid motion in the inner ear, and that I probably held my head at an angle while spinning. However, I did not get the same result when spinning to the right: instead the lines just seemed wobbly.

Then, strangely on-topic, a safety training presentation was posted on the Civil Air Patrol website about spatial disorientation: http://www.capmembers.com/media/cms/Spatial__Disorientation_1EB70933CA251.ppt Very informative!
There are types of motion that trick your body into thinking it's moving one way and is really not. I'm wondering how that's linked to the visual sense too, and if that's an integral part of making sense of it all.

So now, knowing all of this, I think more experimentation is in order. I want to try spinning left vs. right, head tilted vs. not, and eyes closed vs. eyes open. I'm wondering if the time it took to readjust differs for different people or different physical situations or awareness. If you have any personal experience or information on this, share it in the comments! And let the mad science begin! (Or, if these experiments sound like a bad idea and I might hurt myself, let me know too... I don't think it would do any harm, but I don't know everything.)

Oh and also, check out this cool thing about visual cognition: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7524529047833923429#

Seeking and Finding

A few things today. I was thinking about theoretical physics. I'm trying to get some real heroes, people who have influenced me throughout the years. I already made a list of artists (elsewhere) but I noticed quite a few scientists who have also influenced the field of visualization, and/or are personally inspiring to me:

Erwin Schrödinger - I studied him in high school, drew a picture of him too.
Max Planck - one of the founders of Quantum Mechanics, always cool. It turns out I agree with a lot of his philosophy.
Hendrik Lorentz - Lorentz transformations, space and time.
Pierre-Simon Laplace - inventor of our well known Laplace transforms.
Joseph Fourier - Fourier transforms.
Joseph Louis Lagrange - more related to calculus, but anyhow...some of you might recognize the "Lagrange point" idea from sci-fi/aerospace.
Nikola Tesla - because he's awesome.
Roger Penrose - Penrose steps, other impossible geometry, really cool tiling methods. Geometry. Yes.

I feel like I'm like two people, a split consciousness... the technical side and the artistic side. Am I a complete person, since I have the two parts? Is a complete person made of only two parts? We like to divide things up into dualities...but I'm not quite sure it is so.

So I came up with a list of parts that people require to be full people. You can debate these or not. It is not exhaustive. It is only my random thoughts for now.
Physical - lots of parts.. skeleton, flesh, blood. Flesh is divided into muscles (things that move the skeleton) and organs (things that do stuff).
Mental - creativity (artistic), reasoning (technical), senses, memory
Spiritual - Moral, Mystical (6th sense?)

Then I was listening to something about the sense of Curiosity/Interest/Anticipation ... which is apparently what's caused by Dopamine! It's not the "pleasure" sense, it's more the "seeking" sense. Listen here: [link]
I was struck by how I am always seeking things. It's why I play video games. It's why I joined Civil Air Patrol. It's what I'm always doing in my dreams. And it's the most fun thing in the world. I love exploring. I love seeking knowledge, and sharing it so other people can become interested and start seeking for themselves! I realized I always try to understand the way the world works, because I haven't quite figured it all out yet. It's the realm of all the sciences, the arts, and philosophy. And I love exploring realms of fiction too: new universes, vast and amazing. So, here's to seeking! Video games really are drugs.