Sexism In Game Development.

I don’t think we have any gamers in the rabble camp, but this doesn’t really come as a surprise. The gaming industry is a hornets nest of sexism. 

The excellent Mother Jones tracks how a Twitter hashtag #1reasonwhy took off in response to Luke Crane, some role-playing gamer, who asked, “Why are there so few lady game creators?”  This is something that’s blown up for discussion a few times already this year.  Back in June Anita Sarkeesian set up a Kickstarter project to look at the general sets of tropes female characters are hammered in to. The project set off just about every misogynistic gaming troll on the net, exposing a culture where it was acceptable among thousands to create a game encouraging people to punch Anita Sarkeesian in the face.

It’s a good question: While women make up 47 percent of the gaming audience, a 2005 study (the most recent comprehensive survey) revealed that more than 88 percent of the industry’s employees are male. Female game devs—and their male supporters—have some theories – Mother Jones

Needless to say, the video game industry is a billion dollar rival to Hollywood at this stage, so of course it contains the same problems as any mass entertainments industry.Gaming by its nature, is a highly involved and time consuming process of production. Is there any current of critical or alternative gaming out there that side steps the eight year old wank fantasies? Or like those spirit broken developers in Indie Game The Movie, is creating games outside the bigger players with their clumsy market driven sexism just too hard?