Video Games, STEM, and Representation

I think it’s important to recognize the connections between the video game industry and other STEM fields. Too often video games get forgotten because they’re, well, games. They are play. They aren’t serious. (All of which of course is contentious.) Brilliant work is being done about the gender inequities in STEM fields that we can crib from. For example, I recently saw a speaker, Joyce Main, who did a research study of hundreds of schools and studied the correlation between dropout rates (in the sciences) or time to completion (in the humanities) for the PhD and gender of advisor and faculty. She found that in the sciences, a 1% in increase in the number of female faculty increased the likelihood that the women in the program will graduate by 17.6%! Again 1% increase in female faculty = 17.6% increased graduation rate for women (no adverse affects for anyone else).

In 2005, game designer Sheri Graner Ray founded a group that would create massive ripples in the gaming industry.  Her group, called Women in Games International (WIGI), responded to “a growing demand around the world for the inclusion and advancement of women in the games industry” (“About”). Working in the gaming industry since 1989, Graner Ray recalls, in a 2012 interview, the culture in which she has chosen to spend her life: “Oh I was told over and over at the time that women don’t play computer games.  So why should I care? You know, why should I care about female players that don’t play our games.  So yeah, I was told flat out, not just by people I worked with, but by people in the industry, ‘well girls don’t play games.  So why should we care?’”[1] The invisibility of female gamers is pervasive, and is indicative of many other serious issues happening within the gaming industry. Graner Ray’s organization works to make women more visible, as well as to increase the numbers of women within the field.

The lack of women in the gaming industry, whether they really aren’t there or whether their presence is obscured, is not surprising, considering the difficultly women have found in entering most science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. A 2009 US Department of Labor report shows that “nine of the 10 fastest-growing occupations that require at least a bachelor’s degree will require significant scientific or mathematical training” (AAUW 2). In this report, technology-related fields (like gaming) are predicted to show the largest increase. As of 2009, women represented about 22% of the workforce overall in computer programming fields, including both the academy and the industry. This report further shows that salary, prestige, quality, and other desirable job qualities will be increasingly found in highly technical positions. Essentially, this report suggests that in the near future, if you want a well-paid, prestigious, and high-quality job, you will likely have to be well trained in technology and in science.[2] This statistic may not surprise anyone, as it is often incorporated into popular lore that all jobs will involve a computer one day (Selfe). It is, however, troubling that women represent only 22% of the workforce in these position.

The video game industry is certainly no exception to this trend. However, because of the complex interaction of many factors over the past 30 years, the video game industry has become an exaggerated source of this type of underrepresentation. Far below the meager 22% of women in computer programming fields overall, women represent around 11% of all jobs in the gaming industry, falling to under 5% when looking at programming positions. The video game industry has since 2004 made more money than Hollywood (Yi), with games regularly making double or triple big screen blockbuster movies (Chatfield). Of music, movies, and games, the veritable trifecta in big-buck entertainment industries, games is the largest growing by a wide margin. And in this fast growing industry, in the fastest growing (technical) positions, women are abysmally underrepresented. This is troubling.

In addition to these statistics that make the video game industry an ideal spot to carryout the kind of analysis that can be useful when examining gender issues in all STEM disciplines, the games industry also has a unique capacity for long-lasting yet rapid change. In academic game studies, we are not writing armchair essays and ungrounded theory that will likely have no tangible impact outside of our departments; rather, the pervasive crossover and hybridity in the field has created an environment where academic voices are heard in the industry and industry voices are heard in the academy.  In fact, many of the most well known professors studying video games are also game designers, and many of the top-selling books on video games are written by practitioners. If we as academics want to do work that will create change, this is the ideal field.