Eric Iversen

Same story, different verse

Online gaming checks many of the boxes that we have learned to associate with break-out tech stories –surging to sudden visibility after taking shape under the radar, big business opportunities for first movers and early investors, and – not least – notable problems with inclusiveness and diversity. Going back years and persisting today, online gaming has been an often hostile environment for girls and women in the areas of both play and development. One hopes it’s not already too late to correct the course and forestall the ossification of inequity that seems to have occurred in other tech fields.

A quick rise

Online gaming was already growing in popularity before COVID. The National Association of Collegiate Esports, for example, formed in 2016, consisting of seven member colleges with varsity-level e-sports programs. By 2020, over 170 schools ran such programs. Call of Duty, Overwatch, Fortnite, FIFA (soccer), and Madden (football), and Rocket League (has to be seen to be believed) are some of the most popular game titles in which these schools compete.

Pre-COVID, competitions among professional gamers would pack indoor arenas and command huge online streaming audiences as well as generate big prize money for the competitors. During COVID, though, the industry had to adapt to online-only activities. It adapted well, as both viewership and participation increased notably, though prize money shrank. One estimate held that about 500 million people watched e-sports competitions in 2020, four times the viewership from four years earlier. Prize money, though, decreased precipitously with the loss of in-person event revenues.

Online access, anywhere, any time

The largest live-streaming platform is Twitch, where people can watch other people play video games through their own online devices. Last April, during the first full month of lockdown, Twitch viewership jumped by 50 percent from March. Total hours watched per month were estimated at over 1.6 billion worldwide last spring, more than 100 percent above the same month a year before. Facebook Gaming and other live-streaming services saw jumps, too, though not quite as large. A venue for both amateurs and professionals, live-streaming game platforms have quickly become an active, populous virtual “third place” that seems likely to persist even beyond COVID-driven constraints on in-person gatherings.

Market energies

The climax of the online gaming break-out narrative is, of course, the arrival of big money. During COVID, every kid with access to a mobile device connected to the internet has been pestering their parents for time to play Roblox, along with demands for Robux, the online currency used to buy virtual items inside the Roblox universe. Roblox went public in March with a target price of $45, and it closed at $69.50 on its first day of trading. The platform reported 32.6 million daily users and $924 million in revenue at the end of 2020, both increases of over 80 percent from the year before. These figures made Roblox the highest-earning mobile game in the world.

Easy online connections

Roblox has surged in popularity during COVID because it provides an easy platform for kids to interact remotely with their friends while playing games together online. Most popular among 8- to 15-year-olds, Roblox commands more total hours of attention among kids and teens than YouTube. And the appeal of the game cuts across gender lines; girls are both heavy users as well as developers of games. Demographic data are hard to come by among kids this age because of constraints on collecting such information, but among users overall, estimates suggest just over 50 percent are male and 45 percent are female, a 10-point increase in female usage since 2017.

The dark side(s)

This trend, though, puts girls on a collision course with an online gaming culture that can be coarse and abusive to female players and developers. In one of the most toxic displays of this culture, the 2014 Gamergate campaign channeled hate and harassment towards several high-profile women in the gaming industry. Fantastical, fictional accusations against these women cloaked a misogynistic resentment among a large enough number of males in gaming to catalyze online attacks that spilled over into real-life threats. And commentators have drawn a through-line from the amorphous, sexist (and racist), flamboyantly violent rhetoric of Gamergate to Trump-era politics and the assault on the Capitol Building of January 6.

Driving girls away

Even if Gamergate flamed into view before, in almost all cases, they were old enough to notice, teenage girls are getting the message that game development is not for them. On platforms like Twitch, reports of harassment and abuse are not unfortunately uncommon. A study by Google found that teen girls, despite avidly playing games themselves, become notably less likely to proclaim interest in making games as they get older. Interest in playing and making games decreases by 20 percent comparing girls between ages 13 and 15 to girls 16 to 18 years old. And girls’ perceptions of people who “make games for a living” undergoes a notable shift from female to male. These perceptions become reality in the workforce, as the 11:10 ratio of boys to girls who play games as teens becomes a 3:1 ratio of men to women who work in the games industry.

Changing the culture

Girl-specific initiatives to inspire interest and create opportunity in game development have started to appear. Two high-profile efforts are Girls Make Games and Girls Who Game, camps in the first case and clubs in the second dedicated to fostering girls’ confidence and accomplishment in game development.  Both activities share an emphasis on game development as more than just coding. They highlight the visual arts, creative storytelling, and collaborative teamwork that go into building a game. One study, in fact, found all of these cross-disciplinary, “STEAM”-oriented dimensions of game development specifically appealed more to girls than to boys. And this video game design class for elementary students exemplifies exactly how multi-modal such an approach to learning can be. Combining technical skills with problem-solving, imagination, and teamwork, the argument for game development as a vehicle for developing 21st-century skills practically makes itself.

Girls Make Games seems especially awesome. Founded by an Arab-born MIT graduate, Laila Shabir, the program has converted to virtual-only summer camps because of COVID.  Since launching in 2014, though, it had grown to 89 sites around the world, reaching over 20,000 girls. Over three weeks, girls work together in teams to build a game of their own devising and then demo the games live to an audience of family members on the last day of camp. The documentary short about the camp, which highlights Shabir’s life story and then Demo Day itself, will soften even the stoniest of hearts.

More ways to make it work

Game development lends itself to virtual instruction, of course, as an online-friendly medium. As a result, many learning programs can serve future game-developing girls from their own homes. Two such services are iDTech and Game-U. For what it’s worth, our own 8-year-old daughter will be spending part of her summer with the former, advancing skills she has developed from making multiple Roblox games of her own this long pandemic winter. Promoting these skills will probably only increase her demands for access to the best laptop in the house, but nobody ever said education was cost-free.

The imperative to improve things

The gaming industry clearly suffers from womens’ under-representation in game development. Who can imagine the game titles that never were because so many girls drop out of pathways to a career in the field? These lost games take their place in line behind the many problem-solving technologies we do not enjoy because of the lack of diversity in technical fields. Bias-free facial recognition software, anyone?

In the best of worlds, the field of play is open to all for the purposes of pointless fun and inclusive camaraderie. Many kids would certainly report their experiences with online gaming in terms of positive sharing and enjoyment. When play becomes industry, though, we clearly need to be doing better at realizing the future of inclusiveness and joy that kids’ early experiences with online gaming is implicitly promising.

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Eric Iversen is VP for Learning and Communications at Start Engineering. He has written and spoken widely on STEM education and related careers. You can write to him about this topic, especially when he gets stuff wrong, at eiversen@start-engineering.com. 

You can also follow along on Twitter @StartEnginNow.

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