WIGI Conference Notes Part 1 - Keynote on "Inclusiveness"
So, on September 10, almost a month ago now, I went down to Microsoft's Redmond, WA campus to attend the Women in Games International summit. I took a lot of notes and this post is the first in a series I'll do here on my blog about what I learned. Hopefully my memory of the anecdotes that were told is still accurate.
To start, I learned that the Redmond campus is pretty confusing, and when I'm told to "follow the signs for parking for building A" I shouldn't really expect many signs, and the ones I do find will be difficult to see from the road and at times even misleading. I told myself to see finding my way around as an adventure game and managed to get parked, then ran into some other very lost women and, together, we found our way to the appropriate building. Fortunately the conference staff must have anticipated some of the troubles, they'd left good signage out for us to find our way once we were out of the underground lot.
WIGI is a fairly new organization. They held their first conference last year, and around 125 people attended. This one had 400 pre-registered. I was surprised to see a few brave young men among the crowd, some of them not even dragged there by significant others. Other than that this was one of those odd experiences of being in a room full of women at a technology event. Usually that only happens to me when attending technical writing things.
The keynote was delivered by Shannon Loftis of Microsoft Game Studios (you'll see Microsoft show up a lot throughout this series, given that they sponsored the event, gave it a place to happen, supplied snacks, drinks, and even buffet-style food at the end for the gab time). Ms. Loftis displayed an excellent sense of humor and throughout her talk it was obvious that she'd needed one to survive in the game industry for over ten years. Her talk was titled "Supporting an Inclusive Work Culture," and focused on the many ways that women and minorities can end up either being made to feel as though they don't belong, or quietly being passed over for jobs.
Honestly, I had expected my eyes to glaze over during this talk since it seemed to me that talking to a bunch of women who are a minority in a particular industry about inclusiveness was the wrong way around, but she did have some interesting things to say. For one thing, she said it is important to know yourself when it comes to trying not to let biases influence how you see people. We have to know the things that tend to make us automatically "flip the bozo bit" on people so that we're aware of them when it happens. During a job interview someone might say something that we immediately think makes no sense or just didn't expect, and in fact what they may be doing is thinking about things a very different way than we do and in fact might be exactly the person needed on the team to improve your product. She actually looks for someone to "shock" her in a job interview by challenging the way she looks at an issue.
For an example, she discussed an interview where her team was describing the gaming zone they wanted to set up. The woman being interviewed pointed out that she was shy and having to try to join games and see if she'd be accepted smelled a bit too much like potential rejection and might send her running. At first, the interviewers all decided this gal didn't know anything about online gaming and dismissed her. Then later they considered that perhaps she had a point. They hired her and redesigned the entire zone around only showing games with openings, and automatically being accepted to one rather than having to request, and it was a hit.
Apparently when she worked for one company early in her career, they tended to hold meetings in strip clubs on a regular basis. She wasn't forced to attend so she didn't, but this meant that she was left out of key design decisions. Later she was in a meeting with management over the issue and the guy who held the meetings in the clubs told her that maybe she should just take off her own shirt and get some extra money on top for it. While management was horrified and took the guy to task it didn't end up doing a lot of good because the meetings ended up back in the strip clubs.
Fortunately she amended this with the fact that she still deals with some of those very people today and she can't see them doing that kind of thing at all anymore, so things have improved at least.
Another interesting if slightly alarming fact she shared is that turnover for employees in the game industry is higher than in professional sports, so people enter and leave in rapid succession. The main problem is the dreaded "work/life" balance thing, the hours can be so intense that people burn out and leave to regain their sanity. I suppose for those trying to break in this can be a good thing since there's openings. The problem is making sure that you too don't get chewed up and spit out.
... next is Part 2 ...
Sadly enough, I find it neat that women are even being acknowledged in the gaming world other than in the role of sales/PR agents or trade show eye-candy. A few years back the with exceptions of a few game boards (and game testing where I had to use my real name) I used to use a "guy" or gender-neutral name to be taken seriously.
the "other" DeeAnn :-)