Games are for GUYS? Why the industry needs to change and how women across Canada are doing it By Whitney Reyes You walk into your apartment and you are instantly transported into another dimension. It’s cold there. You realize you’re trapped inside a fridge. You feel compelled to collect all the goodies and actively avoid the spinach as if your life depends on it. But evil forces are always trying to hold you down and keep you in place. Will you ever escape? Why is this happening? You are playing So You’ve Been Fridged, a video game made by OCAD student and interactive media artist, Izzie Colpitts-Campbell in collaboration with Katherine Verhoeven and Natalie Zed. Colpitts-Campbell has always been technical and artistic, but she never thought about using her creativity for video games. A lot of women don’t. “(Women) think games could be
all programming, all very technical, so they don’t find themselves aligned to those positions,” said Diana Arruda, a veteran in the video game industry and senior game producer at Arkadium. “They don’t think it’s a viable option.” Dames Making Games, or DMG, is a women-run non-profit that is trying to rectify that fact. It’s a Toronto community that assist women’s journeys into the video game world through a threepronged approach: make, change, play. They held their second intensive game creating workshop or incubator, called Junicorn, over a one-month period in 2013. It led eight women through the gamemaking process from start to finish, including art, coding and story design. This is when ColpittsCampbell made her first game, Wingman.
Above: Left and right - art from “So You’ve Been Fridged” Centre - screen from ColpittsCampbell’s game “Wingman” Courtesy of Izzie Colpitts-Campbell, 2013 She was not into video games when she started, but ColpittsCampbell continues learning programming languages and now has an interest in playing games. That’s all a part of the incubator plan, said Tanya Short, co-ordinator of Pixelles, a women’s gaming initiative similar to DMG, run in Montreal. “The goal for Pixelles isn’t just to get more women in the industry,” she said. “It’s to get more women comfortable thinking that it’s normal for anyone to make a game.” All types of games are made, from interactive simulations to 3D
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