I’ve been banging on the drum of inclusivity and diversity in games culture for nearly a decade on this blog and for over half a decade on Twitter. I have often felt as if I was one of a few who cared about these issues. Worse, I felt at times that it was only women who cared about issues of…
At my recent panel at Emerald City Comicon, called “Looking Past the Target Audience: Gender, Race, and Geek Identity Politics,” we as a group of panelists were fully aware that we would not be able to cover a topic this huge in scope and complexity in the short amount of time allotted. This is, briefly, what we discussed in the panel:…
I will be speaking on a panel at Emerald City Comicon, which is taking place in Seattle from 1 – 3 March: Looking Past the Target Audience: Gender, Race, and Geek Identity Politics Sunday, March 3 Room: 2AB Start: 1:00 PM End: 1:55 PM This year, the geek community’s strained relationship with diversity came to a head. Conflicts over exclusion, and…
An interesting conversation thread happened on Twitter last week. Someone who works at Kickstarter as the specialist for games projects asked why there are so few women working in the games industry. It’s a huge question, one that seemed like a borderline troll question, given this person’s apparent disingenuous and condescending attitude in his follow-up tweets. Despite that inauspicious start,…
One of the big pieces of news over the past few weeks has been the organized harassment campaign (trigger warning) against Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency. What she did wrong, according to the harassers, was to dare to put up a Kickstarter project to raise funds to create a series of web videos examining common stereotypcial female characters in videogames. She hasn’t…