Game-Designing Woman
Baltimore County is a mojor hub in the gaming world, and women are joining the play.
November 22, 2007
By Fern Shen
Photography by Bryan Burris
Brittany Steiner of Firaxis Games played Civilization Revolution long before she ever went to work on the empire-building console game.
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Brittany Steiner knows the rap on her favorite video game character, Lara Croft.
“Lara has an impossibly busty figure and the smallest, tightest adventurer clothes you’ll find in the genre,” says Steiner, a technical artist for Firaxis Games in Hunt Valley.
Lara is often cited as an example of “demeaning representations of women in video games,” Steiner admits. The main character in Tomb Raider, Lara is basically a 32D version of Indiana Jones.
So what is Lara’s appeal to this precocious 22-year-old game industry professional, a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Baltimore’s Simulation and Digital Entertainment program?
“She’s incredibly intelligent, strong and independent,” Steiner says. “She’s been kicking more ass than any other adventurer for the past decade!”
Cool, competent female characters are just one of the signs that the traditionally ultra-male world of video games is opening to women. Another sign is Steiner herself, along with the handful of other women now working in Baltimore-area game-making companies.
Better known for horses and housing developments, Baltimore County has over the last decade quietly become perhaps the East Coast’s biggest hub for the $12.5 billion game-making industry. The heavy hitters headquartered hereabouts include Firaxis (makers of the Sid Meier’s Civilization games), Big Huge Games Inc. and BreakAway Ltd.
These companies and scores of others in Maryland produce not just entertainment but interactive technologies and “serious games” that can be used for health care, education, military simulation and leadership training.
If you imagine their creative staffs to be a cadre of action-figure-collecting, Teva-wearing, artsy, techie, geeky young guys, you’d be right — almost. But there’s now a sprinkling of women in those java-fueled cubicles, mirroring a small-but-definite change industrywide.
These women hope to be a force for good, putting more choices on the menu for gamers beyond blood, bullets and babes.
“Women gamers are out there, and growing, and the industry watches its audience closely,” Steiner says. “Diversity on the development team helps make a stronger, more widely appealing game.”
But it’s early in the game, and it can be strange being the only woman in the room.
Katie Hirsch, from BreakAway Ltd., calls her work a "dream job."
Katie Hirsch of BreakAway talks about meeting Big Huge CEO Brian Reynolds and describing herself as “the only girl programmer at BreakAway Games.”
“He told me, ‘You’re probably the only girl programmer in Maryland!’” she recalls.
At Firaxis, the 80 employees include five women, says Kelley Gilmore, director of marketing. At BreakAway, the 100 employees include 10 or 11 women, according to the company’s corporate executive vice president, Deborah Tillett.
“That includes a female programmer, a female game developer and a quality assurance person, and I’m at the top of the company,” Tillett says. “We’re lucky. Ten percent in this industry is not bad.”
Tillett, Gilmore and other leaders of local game development firms say that they’re eager to hire qualified women, but that the industry struggles with women’s underrepresentation in science, math and computer-related fields.
“We know that lots of little girls have ability in math and science, but when they’re in middle school there are no mentors, no peers, no support for them to go further in math and science and programming,” Tillett says. “And if they do, they find they are often the only girl in their classes.”
Hirsch thinks girls and women shun programming and the game industry because they’re intimidated by the stereotypes.
“They feel like the guys know this stuff already. They think, ‘They’re guys, they’ve got it together,’” Hirsch says.
With a median annual salary estimated by Game Developer magazine at $73,000, game developing is a desirable field. There are the occasionally hellacious hours, including the fabled “crunch” to make production deadlines. But the local companies try to compensate with flextime and workplace stressbusters like arcade games, scooters, free espresso, pingpong and pool tables. BreakAway has “Coffee with Kids” day. Hirsch calls it “my dream job.”
Growing up a Navy brat in San Diego and Virginia Beach, Hirsch loved not just Disney animation and video games but making new rules for old games like Risk and Monopoly.
After graduating in 2004 from the University of Maryland Baltimore County with degrees in animation and computer science, Hirsch got a job at BreakAway starting as an artist — making models, adding texture graphics to games. Now she’s in programming, where she concentrates on “user interface,” which means making the parts of the game not specifically related to game-play.
“Like, your character could be eight different classes. ‘1’ is a hunter, ‘2’ is a warrior. I have to convert that ‘1’ into an icon and make it understandable to the user,” she explains.
Hirsch has worked on such well-known titles as The Lord of the Rings, Battle for Middle-Earth II: The Rise of the Witch-King. For someone whose idea of a good time is reading the latest Harry Potter or getting together with friends to play Mario Kart, “this kind of job is just fun for me,” she says.
Steiner, like Hirsch, grew up loving art and playing PC games such as Oregon Trail and then console games. She started putting those interests together — and finding her career path — after taking a multimedia design class at the Community College of Baltimore County.
“It was like another dimension opened up in my universe!” she says.
At Firaxis, she’s been working on the latest version of a strategy game she played long before she contemplated a job in the industry: Civilization Revolution, an empire-building console game.
“They’ve always struck me as gender-neutral, quality gaming titles,” she says.
Games like Civilization, which can move the industry beyond its young male customer base, are regarded as the Holy Grail by the maturing video game industry. (See sidebar.)
That trend, Steiner and Hirsch know, bodes well for women trying to break into the business.
“The games from more diverse [development] teams appeal to more diverse audiences,” Steiner says — including girl gamers, whose growing numbers will in turn mean more women getting into the business.
Steiner’s own gaming tastes are nothing if not diverse. Besides Tomb Raider, she enjoys the ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto, and argues that games, like any other cultural or artistic expression, should not be censored for adults.
On the other end of the scale, she plays abstract Internet games like Flow and the green-themed Eco Creatures, and she just finished beating the offbeat virtual waitress game Diner Dash “with all expert ratings.”
Not surprisingly, her advice to women who want a career in game design is simple: “Play!”
Good skills and a great portfolio are vital, Steiner says. UMBC, UB and the Maryland Institute College of Art all have strong programs in digital arts that have become pipelines to jobs with local firms.
But, she says, “you can bet in an interview, beyond all of the questions about your experience and skills, you will be asked, ‘So what games do you like to play?’”
It’s a question that has been pinging around the video game industry for years, but some say game makers haven’t tried hard enough to answer it.
Indeed, why bother, if boys and men keep spending so much money on sports games like Madden or games with titles like God of War,
Splatterhouse, Mortal Kombat or Thrill Kill?
According to a recent survey by industry analyst the NPD Group, hard-core gamers are overwhelmingly (nearly 80 percent) male. And while these hard-core, mostly guy gamers make up just 2 percent of the total, they spend far more than any other segment, NPD found.
“The video game industry has been continuing to fail women by not producing suitable content,” David Gardner, a chief executive of video game publisher Electronic Arts, said at a conference recently. His company’s research found that 40 percent of teenage girls played video games versus 90 percent of teenage boys and that most girls lost interest in games within a year.
But as growth in video game sales levels off, industry leaders say they will have to broaden their product lines to appeal to families, older people and women.
So what do women gamers want? The answer doesn’t lie in the so-called “pink games,” analysts agree. Such games, geared to shopping, fashion or pop stars, have never been big sellers. One solution may be found in games about relationships and social networks, such as Electronic Arts’ The Sims.
Most Sims players are girls — 70 percent are women under 25. With about 40 million copies sold, the game, which lets players move about in a virtual society, is arguably one of the most successful titles ever.
Kiya Jenkins, 12, of Lutherville, said she likes games that are easy and fun to play with others, like those played on the Nintendo Wii. The company is hoping for a crossover hit with the new Wii, a console whose small wireless controller can be used for family-friendly virtual tennis and golf matches and goofy games such as WarioWare.
“We play it at home and have these big golf tournaments and my dad gets really into it,” Kiya says. “He goes nuts when he hits the ball into the water.” She and her mother, Alicia Jenkins, were at a Best Buy recently looking for an extra Wii controller.
Kiya said she and her 10-year-old sister love to play participatory games like Dance Dance Revolution and Karaoke Revolution American Idol. Jenkins, an insurance claims adjuster, said she plays games at work during downtime but sticks to quick and simple offerings like Tetris and Bejeweled, which she finds at shockwave.com and popcap.com.
These so-called “casual games,” nonviolent puzzle, trivia or arcade-style fare, are usually free, with upgraded versions downloadable for a fee. Increasingly popular (by some estimates, more than 100 million American PC users play them), they appeal especially to girls and women.
Women gamers may not be as high-spending and hard-core as men, but they are out there playing. According to the Entertainment Software Association, women make up 38 percent of all players. For online games, women make up 42 percent of all gamers, according to a recent study from the NPD Group.
