Where the women at?

That question was on my mind as, session after session, I found myself surrounded by men.  It reminded me the O.W.M. (Old White Men) who gather in corporate meeting rooms and government offices everywhere, though O.W.M. tend to be better dressed and don't sport purple mohawks.

Various statistics put the number of female video game players at 30%-60% of the total gaming populous.  You would have thought they were an endangered specifies relegated to myths if their attendence at the GDC was any indication of their existence.

It wasn't until I made my way over to the Expo portion of GDC on the second day that I saw the women.  They were a pretty lot, squeezed into tight shirts, handing out swag.  Booth babes.  They weren't as scandalously undressed as the ones that decorated the booths of E3, but it was obvious that men made the video games, made the business decisions, and did the secret handshakes in shuttered back rooms.

At the company I work for, less than 10% of my co-workers are women.  A quarter of them work in the front office.  It's not that we filter out women in the hiring process, it's just that we hardly ever see a resume from a woman.

If 30% of the doctoral recipients in mathematics are women, surely the video game industry can attract a better share of women into it's workforce.  Video games aren't just about wizards, orcs, and super soldiers on steroids--we've got, Barbie and Hello Kitty, etcetera, etcetera.

I had a feeling it was coming, and it did.  My web host turned off my account suddenly yesterday.  I've managed to find a new host (GoDaddy.com) and get a few things set up but it'll be a long while before everything is tweaked to my liking.  I've lost most of my old content.  It may be recoverable but I don't know that I have the energy to do it.

Part of the problem is that I'm switching from WordPress (a Linux application) to blogengine.net (an ASP.net application) and the data formats are not easily compatible.  The reason for the switch is mainly that I want to experiment with an ASP.net web site.  WordPress worked well and was mostly easy to mantain and had lots of community support.  blogengine.net is newer, has less support thus far, but since it runs on ASP.net, I'm hoping that creating widgets and customization will be easier.  Time will tell.  One immediate problem was that GoDaddy runs ASP.net application at Medium trust level, which meant that I had to find a modified version of blogengine.net (http://www.van-zand.com/ModPack/).  Problem solved and here we are today.

I should be packing right now.  I'm headed up to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference.  I don't usually go to these things because you can't learn anything immediately useful in a one hour lecture and three days is a lot of valuable production time lost.  However, rather than hoping to learn something, I'm hoping to see something inspiring this year.  The realist side of me says that even if I am inspired, I can't apply that inspiration to my work because deadlines and production pipelines won't allow for it.  Nobody likes a realist though, not even the realist.