作者：Brenda Brathwaite

我1981年刚踏入电子游戏领域时，有幸能够同Linda Currie共事。我完全不知道我们是当时加入了10%的女性游戏开发者行列，我也从未怀疑过我们组合的可能性。我们合作了近20年，早在Sir-tech Software（游戏邦注：电子游戏的先驱，2001年宣布关闭）之前就一起制作了《巫术》和《铁血联盟》系列之类的电子游戏。

多年以来，许多女性纷纷加入我们的行业，成为游戏设计师、美工、动画师、程序员、制作人及音效设计师。2010年3月在旧金山举行的GDC国际游戏开发者协会Women in Games圆桌会谈论会上，情况更是显而易见：会议座无虚席。

female developers(from blog.playfirst.com)

话题无疑主要围绕如何让更多女性加入行业。从某种程度上说，满满的会议室显然说明，这个问题已得到解决。有些人惋惜越来越少女性选择计算机科学专业，而有更多人称自己是办公室里的唯一女性。这是否是个问题，如果是的话，那解决方案是什么？

我从9岁女儿Maezza那里找到答案：“妈咪，班上男生告诉我，电子游戏不是给女孩子玩的。”

她这样回应那男孩，女生不但会玩这些游戏，而且还会开发游戏，她很快将这些话语转化成实际行动。如今在她的第三个棋盘游戏设计里，Maezza通过设计和体验游戏，提高自己的写作技能，研究有趣话题，运用数学、初级概率和统计学知识。通过《文明革命》，她轻松就能说出许多重要世界领导人，知道西班牙有无敌舰队，拿破仑统治法国，甘地是位杰出领导者。她认为战争只有通过数学进行解决。她很困惑为什么真正的世界领导者没有这么做。她很激动今年夏天要学习编程，我保证她会如愿以偿。

圆桌会议上的其他女性也分享了类似故事，迫切想要告诉在游戏开发领域中找不到机会的年轻女性，我们完全能够靠开发游戏维持生计。我一直都觉得我们女性非常幸运，而这份幸运正通过一个不可思议的娱乐消遣扩散至更多女性身上：农场游戏。

当我收到37岁侄女Pam邀请我成为她《FarmVille》邻居的文本信息时，我就发现情况已不大相同。从来不理解我战利品投掷和战斗平衡晦涩语言的朋友和家人如今顺利掌握耕地、种植和采摘的简单操作。通过Facebook，30-40岁的女性变成新的“硬核”玩家。我们进行耕作，和虚拟宠物玩耍，成为他人的邻居，其用户规模之庞大在电子游戏中前所未有。

我觉得这一用户分布转变不是暂时现象。虽然新“硬核”玩家不会选择下款《毁灭战士》或《雷锤之神》，但Facebook游戏令上百万的女性群体变成游戏玩家，这些女性玩家未来也许会鼓励自己的女儿涉足这一领域或者自己尝试在此谋取职位。

Facebook能够以独特的超社会方式融合趣味性和朋友，而正是这一新发展趋势给我们带来新一代女性开发者。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2010年3月24日，文章所涉数据及事件以当时为背景。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Women in Games: From Famine to Facebook

By Brenda Brathwaite

When I entered the video game industry in 1981, I was fortunate to work with another woman, Linda Currie. I had no idea we composed roughly 10% of the female game development population at the time, nor did we suspect how unlikely our pairing was. We worked together for nearly 20 years on the Wizardry and the Jagged Alliance series of video games before Sir-tech Software, a pioneer in video games, closed down for good in 2001.

Through the years, hundreds of women have joined our ranks as game designers, artists, animators, programmers, producers and sound designers, and at the International Game Developers Association’s (IGDA) Women in Games roundtable discussion at the recent Game Developers Conference held March 9-13, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, it was exceptionally visible, too: every chair and every wall spot were taken.

Predictably, perhaps, the topic centered around how we might get still more women into the industry. To some, the full room seemed proof that the problem had been solved. Others lamented declining numbers of women pursuing computer science degrees, and still more talked of being the only woman at their work place. Was it a problem, and if so, what were the solutions?

The answer, for me at least, came through the ears and out the mouth of my 9-year-old daughter, Maezza. “Mommy, a boy in my class told me that video games aren’t for girls.”

She responded by telling the boy that not only did they play them, but they made them, too, and she put those words immediately into action. Now on her third board game design, Maezza has improved her writing, researched interesting topics, and applied mathematics, elementary probability and statistics through the design and play of games. Through Civilization Revolution, she easily names many important world leaders, knows that the Spanish had an armada, Napoleon led the French, and Gandhi was a great leader. She believes that combat is resolved through math and only math, and she has openly wondered why real world leaders don’t do the same. She is excited to learn programming this summer, and I’ll see to it that she gets her wish.

Other women at the roundtable shared similar stories and expressed a desire to get the word out to young women who might not even see opportunities in game development where really, yes really, you get paid well to make and play games for a living. Not a day goes by that I don’t think how fortunate we women are, and that fortune, I believe, is coming to a great many more women through an unlikely pastime: farming.

I realized how much had changed when I received a text from my 37-year-old niece Pam asking me to be her neighbor in FarmVille. Friends and family who never understood my arcane language of loot drops and combat balancing had at last grasped the simple act of plow it, plant it and pick it. Repeat. Through Facebook, women in their 30′s and 40′s had become the new “hard core” gamer. We were farming, playing with our virtual pets and becoming virtual neighbors with one another in numbers never before seen in video game history (82 million and counting for FarmVille alone).

I don’t believe this shift in demographics is a temporary one either. While the new “hard core” gamer might not pick up the next DOOM or Quake, Facebook games have made gamers out of millions of women, the same women who might one day encourage their daughters to pursue a career in this field or pursue it themselves.

It is this new trend, Facebook’s ability to merge fun and friends in a unique and super-social way, that paves the way for and calls out to the next crop of female developers.（Source：huffingtonpost）