Like a lot of forms of media, gaming has a boring white dude protagonist problem. That’s often attributed to the lack of women in game development, but new data released by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) shows that the number of female game developers has doubled since 2009. Hopefully that translates to more diversity in games, too.
Back in 2009, women only made up 11.5% of game developers, but that number has jumped to 22% this year, with men at 76% and transgender or androgynous developers at 2%. Hey, it only has to double one more time to get kind of close to an accurate representation of the total population! Progress!
Things are moving in the right direction, though, which is the important thing. The data comes as part of the 2014 Developer Satisfaction Survey, which aside from the good news that female developers are becoming more prevalent, revealed some sad trends among game developers. A lot of them still aren’t happy with their jobs due to low wages, poor quality of life, and extremely difficult crunch times with extra hours at no additional compensation that they don’t think are necessary (probably due to animating so many women—no, I am not tired of this joke yet).
Will more women on the development side lead to better representation in games? Hopefully, in the future, E3 will have a much longer list of games with playable female characters and a much shorter montage of dudes who all look the same.
(via The Daily Dot, image via Smash Bros.)
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