Posts tagged with women in Blog Eaten by a Grue

Guest author Amanda Cote joins us from the UM Communication Studies department, and is a student working on her Ph.D. in the area of games studies. Feel free to leave comments for her here on the blog.

An article hit the New York Times earlier this month discussing the prevalence of sexual harassment in virtual game play. In the article, they highlight several examples online, from a Kickstarter devoted to documenting how women are portrayed in video games to a blog devoted to the unpleasant comments that women often encounter while playing online games. Quoted in the article are also several people who recognize the need to do something about it.

Authored by Joanna Price: Your friendly CVGA intern, here, to tell you about a new and exciting group. The Computer and Video Game Archive is proud to host a Girls' Gaming Group, the 2nd and 4th Thursday evenings of every month, from 6-9 PM at the archive. Beginners welcome! If you're interested, please join our Facebook group.

The Hand Eye Society will be running two game incubators in Toronto over the next several months, both of which focus on making it easier for women to get involved in creating video games. The group aims to get more underrepresented groups involved in game creation, and is working to dispel certain myths about game development that prevent people from trying it out, such as the assumption that developers have to be experienced in programming and mathematics. According to their article in the Torontoist, anyone who has "completed a project in a creative medium" is eligible to participate.

Authored by Ben Nanamaker: A little while back, one of my favorite web sites for thoughtful articles and analysis about video games, The Escapist, posted a video on an interesting topic of debate: "True Female Characters". The video, part of a weekly series they do called Extra Credits, digs deep into the issue of gender and character in video games.

Since we recently had a young girl in the archive that had a lot of trouble finding something she wanted to play, I thought I'd devote a notable games post to showcase several of the 'girly' games that the archive offers for her age group. So be prepared to be pummeled with sugar and spice and everything nice.