Isn’t that a change that needs to be seen in general, not just gaming?
As a man in the trades, absolutely. I do my best to encourage women of any age to learn a skilled trade. There’s still a bit of a “boys club” sentiment, thankfully it’s starting to die out. There’s not enough people interested in doing the hard work involved in the trades to keep the skills going, even the sexists can’t afford to keep women out.
I have absolutely no issues working next to anyone, regardless of where they are on the gender/sexuality spectrums, all I ask is that they do their share and not be a douche-cannoe.
Maybe unsurprisingly the only 2 asks I have are too much for a lot of people.
As a woman, and a gamer, seeing more women in the industry would be nice, but I don’t really think having more women in leadership roles will draw more women into playing games.
The solution to drawing more women into games is to make quality products at a reasonable price; (by reasonable I mean, able to make a profit without gouging customers.) The solution is to end console exclusivity and release on all platforms. The solution is to allow their customers to own the game they purchase instead of trying to make them rent it. (These sorts of changes will draw in men, women, trans/non-binary from across the board.)
Plenty of games get released full of bugs that get fixed after release because the bean counters at the top are rushing release, or are meddling in content creation when their MBA gives them no practical experience in development, coding, art, music, or play testing. I’m a woman, and I’m not spending money on a buggy piece of shit.
Then their is the issue with day 1 DLC. Day one DLC is not DLC, it’s a fucking money grab designed to milk more income out of your customers. How about those micro-transactions? How about taking some fucking chances instead of releasing sequel after sequel. How many COD and BF games do we really need? I’m a woman, and I’m not interested in playing the same boring, rehashed garbage over and over. I’m pretty sure people in other demographics have similar views.
The solution to making good games is also not MOAR graphics; it doesn’t matter if the art is made by a male/female/non-binary person. Plenty of small studios release games with low/mid graphics and do really well. See Stardew Valley, Hades 1 & 2, hollow knight, terraria, slay the spire, don’t starve, mega bonk, ect.
The solution to making good games is understanding game theory, and the type of game you want to release. Games fall into general modalities. Some games could involve lots of collecting (pokemon,) beating hard enemies/bosses (dark souls,) telling a story (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,) open world exploration (Fall-out 4.) Good games do 1-3 of these things really well. We’re getting to a place where we see more female or LGBT video game protagonists/characters. That inclusivity is great, but that doesn’t stop a game from being trash everywhere else. (Thank you Lara Croft for crawling so the rest of us could walk and run.) I’m not going to run out and buy a game with a female protagonist if the game play is trash.
The Tetris Company is a company that licenses tetris to 3rd parties, and occasionally releases rehashed versions of tetris. Nothing this company does is groundbreaking in anyway, other than trying to be an inclusive employer. (Kudos to them for recognizing the need for inclusivity in organizational hierarchy.) Per the article: Maya Rogers has been the CEO at Tetris since 2014. Her father, Henk Rogers, founded The Tetris Company with Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov back in 1996. Maya Rogers is a fucking nepo baby, so any hot take coming out of her mouth is kinda meaningless to me.
There’s also an incredibly mysoginistic culture in many competitive games. Good luck using a mic as a woman playing CS, for example.
Completely agree though, more women in leadership and even just dev is a good thing, but for the most part people don’t really care who made a product, only how much they like it.
We need less agendas.
The solution to everything is not more women.
If only all of our dads could give us jobs like this!
Her father, Henk Rogers, was the video game developer who secured the rights to distribute Tetris on Video game consoles and began to base his businesses in the U.S.
read the acticle, & it’s literally advertising.
Nothing about empowering women into game leadership positions.
And they recently made a movie about this: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12758060/
It’s… ok.
I feel like “biographical” means something different than it used to.
Rogers noted, “It’s a Hollywood script, a movie. It’s not about history so a lot of [what’s in the movie] never happened.”
We need more people that care about games.
Ffs the latest prominent woman in gaming is the new Xbox CEO, who came from the AI industry.
Workers in gaming need to tick the “love video games” box before any others.
If 50% of Tetris players are women and it’s a game made by mostly men, then it’s already successful and why does it need more women? Just go make games FFS, why is it always a demand to be handed roles in the biggest and most established companies? Also why would games targetting men want more women if they don’t want to target women?
How about we change the laws so resumes are sent without names, interviews conducted without cameras. Then the most qualified person can be hired regardless of whatever the political winds favour…?
How would that work in practice though? Should the voices be scrambled or something and not all interviews are done online. If there’s an asshole who disregards a person because of their name or gender, then it will just happen at the interview, instead of during the resume.
Better having more people like Maya speak up and have more women game developers out there, showing they exist. It’s really about inspiring women to become game developers. But if you don’t see them, how can it inspire anyone?
With that said, I’m pretty sure the statistics are upward going.
Take a moment and think about what you just said. You presented a potential obstacle to implementing their idea and then a fairly accessible solution to that obstacle, and then concluded that it somehow can’t work, and then focused on ‘inspiring girls with the work of woman CEOs’ which suggests you think it is a better way to get women into game dev. However, only the most corporate-brained person would ever look at a CEO and feel inspired, and it wouldn’t be to make a game. Please don’t dismiss a real, practical measure, which could be implemented tomorrow and would make discrimination much more difficult, in favor a hand-wavey possible benefit via the nebulous space of ‘inspiration.’
Who better than the Tetris CEO to make the rotation needed in that industry, hopefully all the blocks fall into place.
ITT: people surprised one of the most recognizable and prolific games in the history of video games has a CEO.
She sounds like a savvy business person:
“We’re half the population, and we bring in a lot of money into the industry, and so I always question when our licensing partners are developing a new Tetris game: how many women do you have on the team? Because our demographic is close to 50[%].”
Yeah that checks out. It’s pretty wild that “developing games for our demographic / population” is so hard for gaming companies to grasp as a winning concept.
I mean… I was half surprised, but mostly because Tetris is so ubiquitous that there are >2500 projects on itch.io alone that have Tetris as a tag. It’s like being the CEO of ‘Rolling Dice.’ So many other creators have taken the idea and run with it into spaces the original creator(s) probably never envisioned. At this point, is there anything but a ship-of-Theseus style construct of red tape holding up a name on something that barely bares any resemblance to what it was 30 years ago?
Puzzle game Tetris has…a company!? That seems unnecessary.
It exists purely to license the rights to Tetris.
And shut down any game that even remotely looks like Tetris.
Have they…done that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tetris_Company#Legal_enforcement
TTC drew attention in the late 1990s when it attempted to remove freeware and shareware clones of Tetris from the market by sending out cease-and-desist letters claiming both trademark and copyright infringement.[11] Creators of Tetris clones claimed that the company had no valid legal basis to restrict tetromino games that did not infringe on the Tetris name trademark, since copyright “look-and-feel” suits have not stood up in court in the past (Lotus v. Borland), and because the letters made no patent claims.[12]
In August 2008, Apple Inc. removed Tris, a clone of Tetris from its online App Store.[13] In March 2009, the Tetris Company sued BioSocia, operator of the Omgpop gaming portal[14][15] because one of its multiplayer games, Blockles, was too similar to Tetris. By September 2009, Omgpop removed the game from the website and replaced it with an alternate that the developers created, based on Puyo Puyo.
In May 2010, lawyers representing The Tetris Company sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notice regarding Tetris clones available on the Android Market.[16] Google responded by removing the 35 games listed in the notice even though, according to one developer, the games contained no references to Tetris.[17][18][19]
In February 2011, the Tetris Company continued to make copyright claims against independently developed Tetris clones, most notably against Tetrada on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The developer, Mario Karagiannis, rejected the claims of copyright infringement on the grounds that copyright does not cover gameplay design, but still removed the game, citing lack of resources to fight what he called “bullying”.[20][21]
In the case Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., a US District Court judge ruled in June 2012 that the Tetris clone Mino from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company’s copyrights by replicating elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks.[22]
In April 2021, a YouTuber called JDH made an operating system that only runs Tetris.[23] Two months later, his GitHub repository was taken offline by The Tetris Company because of copyright infringement.[24][25]
Well consider me better informed, thanks.
One might even say… Puzzling.
golf clap
Then convince more women to play video games and become game devs.
What kind of problems are more women in the industry going to solve, exactly?
Men
Ah, that’s nice, nothing like a little sexism.
I’m obviously joking. More women, much like more people of all other diverse backgrounds like disabled, poc, trans, non-heterosexual, etc, mean that you have a diversity of experience and a diversity of perspectives when you are creating the game. It will be possible to create a game that better expresses the lived experiences of a wider range of people, that meets the accessibity needs of a wider range of people.
only 4% identified as transgender, non-binary or gender diverse
You need to have a comparison against the wider population when you show stats like this. Maybe that’s more than usual? When you say “22% of developers are women,” it’s clear that there are fewer women than the population in general. But we don’t need 50% of game developers being trans. (I mean, that might be fun to see but…)
Tetris has a CEO? Does she hang out with the President of Pong and the Mayor of Space Invaders?
No, but she does ensure the flow of cease and desist letters to lookalike games.
Well, the King of Donkey Kong does exist…
Tetris has a CEO?
And we care what they say when any and all recent (like, last 20 years) releases of Tetris have been money-grubbing slop?
Even going back to the 1980s, the best Tetris games were clones. The only good Tetris games were NES/GB where they couldn’t nickel and dime you, you paid once for the game and that was it, you could play it as much as you wanted to.
I dunno, Tetris Effect in VR is pretty dope. I’m still playing it.
The first time I played Tetris Effect in VR was like a religious experience. It blew my mind.
It’s also just a decent Tetris game, in my opinion.
