Women In Gaming 100 Professionals Of Play

Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play is a celebration of female accomplishments in the video game industry, ranging from high-level executives to programmers to cosplayers. This insightful and celebratory book highlights women who helped to establish the industry, women who disrupted it, women who fight to diversify it, and young women who will someday lead it. Featuring household names and unsung heroes, each individual profiled is a pioneer in their own right. Key features in this book include: *100 Professionals of Play: Interviews and Special Features with 100 diverse and prominent women highlighting their impact on the gaming industry in the fields of design, programming, animation, marketing, voiceover, and many more. *Pro Tips: Practical and anecdotal advice from industry professionals for young adults working toward a career in the video game industry. *Essays: Short essays covering various topics affecting women in gaming related careers, including "Difficult Women: The Importance of Female Characters Who Go Beyond Being Strong," "NPC: On Being Unseen in the Game Dev Community," and "Motherhood and Gaming: How Motherhood Can Help Rather Than Hinder a Career." *"A Day in the Life of" Features: An inside look at a typical day in the gaming industry across several vocations, including a streamer, a voice actor, and many more.

Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women’s resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women’s play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.

Discover the women behind the video games we love—the iconic games they created, the genres they invented, the studios and companies they built—and how they changed the industry forever. Women have always made video games, from the 1960s and the first-of-its-kind, projector-based Sumerian Game to the blockbuster Uncharted games that defined the early 2000s. Women have been behind the writing, design, scores, and engines that power one of the most influential industries out there. In Gamer Girls, now you can explore the stories of 25 of those women. Bursting with bold artwork, easy-to-read profiles, and real-life stories of the women working on games like Centipede, Final Fantasy, Halo, and more, this dynamic illustrated book shows what a huge role women have played—and will continue to play—in the creation of video games. With additional sidebars about other influential women in the industry, as well as a glossary and additional resources page, Gamer Girls offers a look into the work and lives of influential pixel queens such as: Roberta Williams (one of the creators of the adventure genre) Mabel Addis Mergardt (the first person to write a video game) Muriel Tramis (the French "knight" of video games) Keiko Erikawa (creator of the otome genre) Yoko Shimomura (composer for Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, and Kingdom Hearts) Rebecca Heineman (first national video game tournament champion) Danielle Bunten Berry (creator of M.U.L.E. and early advocate for multiplayer games) and more! Whether you’re a gamer girl who plays video games, a gamer girl who makes video games, or a parent raising a gamer girl, this entertaining, inspiring book will have you itching to pick up a controller or create your own video games!

Competitive gaming, or esports – referring to competitive tournaments of video games among both casual gamers and professional players – began in the early 1970s with small competitions like the one held at Stanford University in October 1972, where some 20 researchers and students attended. By 2022 the estimated revenue of the global esports industry is in excess of $947 million, with over 200 million viewers worldwide. Regardless of views held about competitive gaming, esports have become a modern economic and cultural phenomenon. This book studies the full history of competitive gaming from the 1970s to the 2010s against the background of the arrival of the electronic and computer age. It investigates how competitive gaming has grown into a new form of entertainment, a sport-like competition, a lucrative business and a unique cultural sensation. It also explores the role of competitive gaming in the development of the video game industry, making a distinctive contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the history of video games. A History of Competitive Gaming will appeal to all those interested in the business and culture of gaming, as well as those studying modern technological culture.

Discover the women behind the video games we love—the iconic games they created, the genres they invented, the studios and companies they built—and how they changed the industry forever. Women have always made video games, from the 1960s and the first-of-its-kind, projector-based Sumerian Game to the blockbuster Uncharted games that defined the early 2000s. Women have been behind the writing, design, scores, and engines that power one of the most influential industries out there. In Gamer Girls, now you can explore the stories of 25 of those women. Bursting with bold artwork, easy-to-read profiles, and real-life stories of the women working on games like Centipede, Final Fantasy, Halo, and more, this dynamic illustrated book shows what a huge role women have played—and will continue to play—in the creation of video games. With additional sidebars about other influential women in the industry, as well as a glossary and additional resources page, Gamer Girls offers a look into the work and lives of influential pixel queens such as: Roberta Williams (one of the creators of the adventure genre) Mabel Addis Mergardt (the first person to write a video game) Muriel Tramis (the French "knight" of video games) Keiko Erikawa (creator of the otome genre) Yoko Shimomura (composer for Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, and Kingdom Hearts) Rebecca Heineman (first national video game tournament champion) Danielle Bunten Berry (creator of M.U.L.E. and early advocate for multiplayer games) and more! Whether you’re a gamer girl who plays video games, a gamer girl who makes video games, or a parent raising a gamer girl, this entertaining, inspiring book will have you itching to pick up a controller or create your own video games!

Cultural stereotypes to the contrary, approximately half of all video game players are now women. A subculture once dominated by men, video games have become a form of entertainment composed of gender binaries. Supported by games such as Diner Dash, Mystery Case Files, Wii Fit, and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood—which are all specifically marketed toward women—the gamer industry is now a major part of imagining what femininity should look like. In Ready Player Two, media critic Shira Chess uses the concept of “Player Two”—the industry idealization of the female gamer—to examine the assumptions implicit in video games designed for women and how they have impacted gaming culture and the larger society. With Player Two, the video game industry has designed specifically for the feminine ideal: she is white, middle class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled. Drawing on categories from time management and caregiving to social networking, consumption, and bodies, Chess examines how games have been engineered to shape normative ideas about women and leisure. Ready Player Two presents important arguments about how gamers and game developers must change their thinking about both women and games to produce better games, better audiences, and better industry practices. Ultimately, this book offers vital prescriptions for how one of our most powerful entertainment industries must evolve its ideas of women.

The videogame series Mass Effect is a remarkable rarity not only for being an original science-fictional franchise of recent vintage that has risen to such prominent commercial and critical success in popular culture but also for pushing the canonical boundaries of how science fiction as a genre will be experienced and understood in the future. This book analyzes the significance of the game for an understanding of the evolving SF genre and articulates an explanatory framework to limn its landmark reception in videogame history. This book both synthesizes the burgeoning body of scholarship on Mass Effect for a readership unfamiliar with either the game or the critical conversation on its salient importance, while simultaneously, for readers already invested in the science-fiction and videogame scholarship, mounting an extended inquiry as to why Mass Effect has served as such a representative milestone in videogame and genre history. The book should appeal to veteran science-fiction and videogame scholars and students as well as a wide variety of fans, consumers, gamers, and general readers.

Girls and women as game players and game designers in the new digital landscape of massively multiplayer online games, “second lives,” “modding,” serious games, and casual games. Ten years after the groundbreaking From Barbie to Mortal Kombat highlighted the ways gender stereotyping and related social and economic issues permeate digital game play, the number of women and girl gamers has risen considerably. Despite this, gender disparities remain in gaming. Women may be warriors in World of Warcraft, but they are also scantily clad “booth babes” whose sex appeal is used to promote games at trade shows. Player-generated content has revolutionized gaming, but few games marketed to girls allow “modding” (game modifications made by players). Gender equity, the contributors to Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat argue, requires more than increasing the overall numbers of female players. Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat brings together new media theorists, game designers, educators, psychologists, and industry professionals, including some of the contributors to the earlier volume, to look at how gender intersects with the broader contexts of digital games today: gaming, game industry and design, and serious games. The contributors discuss the rise of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) and the experience of girl and women players in gaming communities; the still male-dominated gaming industry and the need for different perspectives in game design; and gender concerns related to emerging serious games (games meant not only to entertain but also to educate, persuade, or change behavior). In today's game-packed digital landscape, there is an even greater need for games that offer motivating, challenging, and enriching contexts for play to a more diverse population of players. Contributors Cornelia Brunner, Shannon Campe, Justine Cassell, Mia Consalvo, Jill Denner, Mary Flanagan, Janine Fron, Tracy Fullerton, Elisabeth Hayes, Carrie Heeter, Kristin Hughes, Mimi Ito, Henry Jenkins III, Yasmin B. Kafai, Caitlin Kelleher, Brenda Laurel, Nicole Lazzaro, Holin Lin, Jacki Morie, Helen Nissenbaum, Celia Pearce, Caroline Pelletier, Jennifer Y. Sun, T. L. Taylor, Brian Winn, Nick YeeInterviews with Nichol Bradford, Brenda Braithwaite, Megan Gaiser, Sheri Graner Ray, Morgan Romine