I’m posting this review of my experience last year at GDC (the Game Developers Conference) held every year here in San Francisco. It was originally part of a letter to my team here at Linden Lab, but I thought you librarians might be interested/amused, considering the gender ratio at most library conferences.

-Erica

Hi guys -
I went to the Game Developers Conference last year and found it to be of dubious value.

The best part of the conference for me was the Expo room, which proved to be a valuable source of alternative employment opportunities. I learned that if I want to move to Las Vegas and design slot machine interfaces, I can more than double my salary, which I’m keeping in mind for when I have a stroke and develop an unquenchable desire for polyester and/or chicken wings. I enjoyed scanning the various game interfaces set up to demo motion graphics products, and filed away a few ideas from the Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG.

Photo by ruminatrix

For me, however, the most memorable moment was riding the escalator of the Moscone center and gazing across a sea of black-clad gamed devs among whom I was the only woman.

As a Person of Estrogen and part of a numeric majority in this world, I’m used to being one of many women developers, operations experts, release managers at work. This isn’t the 1970s. Nerdy women exist and thrive. San Francisco is a welcoming place. Linden Lab is a welcoming place. GDC. Was. Not.

I get the feeling that all is not well with an operation that returns such a limited array.

This scene, riding the escalator, about five years too old but still worried about being mistaken for a boothbabe, has become my personal benchmark for outsider discomfort.

In summary: meh to the GDC.

Borrow someone’s pass and check out the Expo. Cruise the demo games. If you really care about a session, read the person’s book or website instead. And if you really care about making better games, spend the three days watching user observation videos.

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Here’s the best of what I’ve found:

• WomensLaw.org – Incredibly clear and useful site with an excellent FAQ, state-by-state help, info on shelters, courthouse locations, legal forms, advice.
• Battered Women’s Justice Project – Contact list for state Domestic Violence coalitions – These groups can provide individual *advocates* who are familiar with state laws and resources.
• American Bar Association’s Commission on Domestic Violence pdf guide to attaining a lawyer
  

I’ve been finding a lot of links-to-lists-of-links. If you know of any *easy to use* resources that would help a mother with no money avoid a murderous creep, please comment, and thank you.

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In this episode, Sarah Haskins, who is frikking hilarious, introduces us to the helpful and empowering phenomenon known as Wedding Television.

She gently mocks shows like Bridezilla, Rich bride Poor bride, Platinum brides, and other affronts to sanity.

As you know, marriage is only for skinny rich people. At one point, Sarah appears in bike shorts and a sports bra, comparing her normal body to the “horrible fat future” picture used to scare a woman into bridal fitness on a show called “Bulging Brides”.

This video made me feel so much better about my lazais faire approach to wedding planning. See ya in Detroit in December, friends.

I’ll be the one wearing some sort of dress.

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Lately I’ve tried to keep my politics off of this website out of respect for the wonderful diversity of people who have taken librarianship as an identity.*

However, I promised to keep you updated on the research topics I pursue in my off hours.

One of the topics I follow obsessively is the state of reproductive law in the US. I attended the March for Women’s Lives in 2004, and I came away with a new awareness of the scope and diversity of topics affecting women’s health, including poverty, contraceptive access, sex education, sexual violence, racism, and medical research, to name a few. The topic of women’s health goes well beyond the ethics and philosophy of the abortion debate.

One of the groups I most enjoyed seeing were the Medical Students for Choice, young mostly female medical students dedicated to raising awareness of the need to train abortion providers among the medical community.

Imagine a sea of women.

Imagine the mall in Washington DC on a warm sunny day. Imagine the grass and the voices. Everywhere you look there are signs, women, booths, friends, groups, people walking, people sitting, young women, old women, men of all ages and stripes, people of every color, signs from every US state and territory.

Imagine a group of women wearing white lab coats with stethoscopes around their necks, walking in small groups, smiling, talking, and holding signs saying “Medical Students for Choice.”

Some wore badges saying “Future abortion provider.” Some carried signs showing the number of women and young girls who die or are injured from unsafe abortions.

It was like watching a herd of beautiful gazelles as they walked through the chaos of the largest protest in US history. These women snapped with intelligence, kindness, and competence.

Seeing them made me stronger.

I don’t write this to inspire the same old arguments among friends. We can all agree that women’s physical safety is important, regardless of our deeper beliefs.

I love you guys. I’ll get back to writing trivia soon, I promise!

______________

*Yes, I think librarianship is an identity as well as a profession. More on this later.

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Cornell has this killer bus that goes between the Ithaca campus and the NYC campus. It has wireless internet, free snacks, and comfy seats. I’m in geek commuter heaven. Life is good. See you in Brooklyn!

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I finished re-reading Microserfs by Douglas Copeland yesterday. This book was important to me at a formulative time. It helped convince me it was cool to be a nerd. It introduced other tech-inclined women to my humanities-girdled world. It drew a model of unashamed geekery, separate and outside of a traditionally-female need for perfection and image. It was pretty liberating.

An excerpt:

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

* 680X0 assembly language
* Cats
* Early ’80s haircut bands
* “My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group”
* License plate slogans of America
* Plot lines from The Monkees
* The death of IBM

Susan’s an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school – and the punch line is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes.
…
Susan’s a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.

Thanks for your kind comments last night during my Dark Night of the Beer. Friendly words were unexpected and wonderful. I often forget that there are people out there. Hello imaginary people. It’s as though my fictional heroes (Elizabeth Bennet! Harriet The Spy! Meg from Wrinkle in Time!) suddenly started interacting.

Off to haul wood one-armed and scour Craigslist for cars. What would your Dream Jeopardy! categories be?

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Take your pick, ladies and gentlemen, do you prefer your objectification in the form of Sexy Librarian, or Old Lady Librarian?

Here are the search results from yet another hunt for Librarian costumes. The first two you may familiar with, the last provides a charming alternative:

It has been pointed out in some circles (hi coworkers!) that I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to the care and feeding of library professionals. Please allow the above image, as well as the profession’s appalling wages speak on my behalf.

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This one is especially flattering. They call it a “Sexy Secretary” SLASH “Sexy Librarian” costume. Because as you know, the two jobs are interchangeable. Or at least the outfits seem to be.

I love love LOVE that librarians are the subjects of our very own fetish. My mom would be so proud. We should form a labor union, all us sexy librarians, nurses, secretaries, and flight attendants, and charge a licensing fee every time someone wants to objectify us. Like the MPAA for disenfranchised traditionally-female professions. Quick, somebody call Dan Savage!

We do look all like this though. Seriously. Even the guys.

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I game. I play video games. I enjoy shooting digital things. I have the ability to navigate three-dimensional space. There, I said it.

I don’t know what I was afraid of. I’m not going to be stereotyped. As far as I can tell there are no stereotypes of female gamers. It’s not like admitting “Hey you guys I love to shop” or “Gosh I love me some Jesus.” There are no social assumptions about being a female gamer because up to a few years ago, female gamers didn’t statistically exist.

These days however, I’m in good company. New generations of tech-savvy women are reshaping the game industry. According to the charmingly titled 2004 ELSPA report Chicks and Joysticks, female gamers make up 39% of US gamers. We’re only at 25.1% across Western Europe, but in Japan we rule a whopping 65.9%. Plus, in the US, women buy 53% of all PC games. We love The Sims. We love World of Warcraft. We can whoop you at Dance Dance Revolution. Female gamers exist, and we’re starting to eat up market share.

So what’s the problem? Nothing we haven’t handled before. The success of first-person shooters has left the market flooded with Uber-violent 3D games that don’t appeal to women (Well – women who aren’t me. Battlefront, anyone?) And, of course, decades of male-dominated gaming have left a legacy of seriously sexist game characters. Big-boobed wasp-waisted mistresses of the martial arts still grace the covers of RPG manuals and fighting games. I’ve included a few here for your amusement. In a great article titled Why is my girl repellent chasing off all the hot chicks? Mythago describes the lament of the clueless male gamer: “Why aren’t there more female gamers, especially when we go to such lengths to make it clear they aren’t welcome?” He claims that the abundance of porn ladies gracing video and RPGs sends a simple message to potential girl gamers: “You don’t exist. We only think of females as sex toys.”

This whole rant got started because I just attended a nifty lecture here on campus by Michigan State Communications prof John Sherry called “Sex Differences in Video Game Play: What the Industry Doesn’t Know About Why Girls Don’t Play First-Person Shooters”. MSU is doing some cool cognitive psychology-type research on the relationship between game preference and cognitive abilities. It made me nostalgic for East Lansing, Midwestern accents, and Social Science research with its delightful openness to interpretation. It’s pretty damn difficult to say why most women seem to prefer one type of game over another, but I had a good time listening to the theories.

To finish off, and perhaps clense your eyeballs from all those huge electronic breasts, why not have a go at the fully girl-created online game Sissyfight 2000 which lets you become a bitchy schoolgirl fighting on the playground. Scratch, tease, and gang up on other girls, then try and look innocent. Then shoot them with your huge My Little Pony gun.

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