That's been kind of the funny thing about the whole GamerGate issue. Despite some of the ugliness that's transpired from both sides (as will pretty much always happen anytime there's some form of internet pissing match going on), you ask just about anyone in GamerGate what their thoughts are on women in the industry, or as video game characters, etc...and we're pretty unanimously all for it. Some of my all time favorite game developers have been women, starting with Lori Cole and Roberta Williams in the Sierra days. (Lori Cole is working on a new game in the Quest for Glory setting btw!)
Brad pretty much gave the essence of my issues with Femfreq in a handful of words: "misrepresentation their critics as misogynists." Having more and stronger female characters is something I can get behind, as can everyone in GG I've ever seen discuss it. Misrepresenting games and gamers as misogynist is not the way to do it. I think Anita is being counterproductive toward her stated goals by putting people on the defensive who would otherwise be open to her ideals.
So I have no issues with Intel spending money to bring more women into tech and game development. I'm skeptical if it'll have any real success, especially considering some of the partners seem counter productive toward their goal, but more power to them if they can pull it off.
Misrepresenting their foes as misogynists (or racists) has gotten pretty old.
I've been called a misogynist and not supporting women in games even though according to them, I should be the avatar of what they want.
On paper, I should be everything they want and yet they hate me.
Let's do a checklist:
# 1 Our last game was called Fallen Enchantress, about a powerful female character.
#2 Our female characters are dressed respectfully.
#3 We invested a huge percentage of our art budget to ensure that people could design female characters of every race (not just males)
This meant having to create armor, clothes, textures, hair, that dedicated to this and remember, we're a small studio. If we had had only male rigs, we could have literally doubled the number of types of creatures in the game for the player to play as.
#4 Our best known game, Galactic Civilizations (both I and II) were primarily coded by a female game developer.
#5 The art design for our latest game, Sorcerer King, was done by a woman. The UI designer for our new game is a different woman and the random map generation c++ code was written by yet a different woman.
#6 The dev team at Stardock is made up of people from around the world of all races, creeds, etc.
#7 Our management team is highly diverse.
#8 Our working conditions involve no "crunch time", an on-staff nutritionist, an in-house personal trainer with in-house gym (did I mention we are an independent company so it's not like we have some huge corporate office to just willy nilly throw stuff into)
#9 We have a firm that comes out and discusses issues such as sexual harassment and tolerance of other points of view come a couple times a year. And we have been doing this for many years now (i.e. this wasn't done in response to something even if certain people chose to ignore the policy agreements they signed but I digress).
And yet, I'm told that we're bad. We're bad for women. And I'm told this mostly by people who have never hired a woman or minority in their life and work in offices that are 100% male. And those in the media know who they are. I've been keeping the kiddie gloves on about that issue the whole time. I've been astounded seeing people wailing about diversity while working in some of the least diverse environments I've ever encountered. They should be embarrassed.
Go ahead and look at the Dev teams (i.e. the ones who code the websites) for some of these places. Lots of them have it in their about area. All men. At Stardock, it's almost 50/50.
And we make no special efforts to hire people based on their sex or color. We just don't discriminate. So you'll have to excuse me if I'm a little skeptical about the people smearing me online who themselves work in the equivalent of a men's locker room. It just makes me think they're trying to compensate.
They make me think of those people who yell loudly about global warming while driving 40 miles to work each way in an SUV while decrying me as being anti-environment because I don't a carbon tax even though I live in a solar powered house and drive an electric car (powered by solar).
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At CES Intel unveiled a program to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to try to get more people into technical fields, particularly women and minorities. This is great news! In fact, I can’t think of anyone who would be against this.
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