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11:44am on Sunday, 16th July, 2023:
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One of the other panels at the conference I was at in Tenerife concerned talent and professional skills. Naturally, the conversation picked up on the lack of representation of women in games. OK, so in part this was because there were two people on the panel for whom this was their specialisation, but it would have happened anyway because it always does.
I'm usually frustrated by these discussions, because the argument tends to go something like this:
1) 50% of games players are women.
2) X% of game developers are women, where X is greater than 0 but very much lower than 50.
3) Therefore, we need more female developers.
The reason it's frustrating is that it's missing a step. Well, three steps, actually.
The thing is, if 50% of games players are women, well clearly they have no problem playing games created by developers who are (100-X)% men. Why, then, would we need more female developers? The argument doesn't explain this. Political points about diversity and fairness carry some weight, but in practical terms what would increasing the number of female developers buy the games industry if half the player base is female anyway?
The answer is that if we did have more female developers then we would have more developers in total. They wouldn't replace male developers, they'd add to them. The absolute number of developers would be larger. This would mean that more games could be made, which would attract a wider audience. The effect would be to grow the size of overall games audience. If you didn't engage with games before but developers are now making games that you do want to play, you wouldn't really care about the demographics of the developers: you'd just want to play the games.
Drop point 1) from the above argument: it adds nothing. Insert the following steps and it's good to go.
2a) If the number of female game developers, X, is increased by 100-2X, there will be 100-X female developers and 100-X male developers, making 200-2X developers in total.
2b) 200-2X developers can develop more games of a wider variety than can 100 developers.
2c) More games of a wider variety will attract people to play games who don't currently play them, so growing the market.
Hmm, you might want to make it less unappealing by substituting the current up-to-date value for X, rather than just using X.
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