Hula hoop--oohh. So I'm here at the Museum of Design in Atlanta. Museum of Design in--oh!
I almost had it. Hey everybody I'm here at the Museum of Design in Atlanta, hula-hooping
to celebrate the opening of 'XYZ', an exhibit focusing on women in video game design. Because
you know what? Women play video games and they make them. And this is me hula-hooping.
This year actually is my 30th anniversary of being in the game industry. I got into
it by accident. What really interested me about me was the social interaction.
My background is in interactive art. In interactive art there's always this challenge of getting
the interaction to work and getting people to actually engage with an interactive work.
Games are just a really effective form to do that. They've figured out essentially kind
of the magic structure that you need to have to get people to kind of have a sustained
engagement with something that's interactive. You could actually try to tell a story or
you could try to create an experience.
The video game industry has created this very narrow definition of gamer and a very narrow
definition of game. As long as you kind of picture games as being this monolithic thing
then it's easy to say well that's not something I really enjoy. One of my favorite sort of
threads is sort of these games that are devoted towards encouraging people to socialize even
though they're socializing using a computer game, to socialize in person with each other.
That goes back to a game like 'Mule', where you know you're playing this kind of resource
management game but I mean I remember my dad and I playing that game when I was a kid and
it's entirely about the social interaction. It's entirely about yelling at people who
are like have just done something to completely mess up your strategy. Part of gaming design
is what the players are doing, right? So you can't see that until you start playing. You
have to experience a game you can't just sort of look at a game. I'm going to play some
'Ninja Shadow Warrior' in which I have to match up my shadow with a random object that's
going to pop up on screen. So 'Ninja Shadow Warrior' is a photo booth arcade game that
I made inspired by sort of the social space that surrounded arcade games in the eighties.
It's a game that's supposed to encourage uh multiplayer play. I'm here with the creators
of a video game called 'Kiss Controller'. You can play video game while you are kissing
with your partner. There are some games like Wii or Kinect where you can use your body.
I tried to find some kind of using your emotions or you affection to play video game. One person
wears a magnet on his tongue and the other person wears a headset. I can actually map
inside their mouth where the tongue is. One is a bowling game and the other one is a racing
car game. The bowling game when you move your tongue fast and that's the bowling ball's
speed and where your tongue is is the bowling ball's direction. This game right behind me
is called 'Flatlands' and essentially it's like 'Apples to Apples' but instead of just
matching up cards, from an adjective and a noun, you have to pick the board game that
best represents the adjective-noun combo. So for example if the adjective-noun combo
was something like 'sexist gender roles' and I picked up this board game where obviously
it shows all the things that a woman can be which are a secretary, flight attendant, a
nurse, a princess or a ballerina I think that this one would probably win. There's a game
that addressed the subject of female masturbation through the concept of a bunny. So there's
this bunny in the game and you have to kind of stroke the bunny in certain ways to send
the bunny on this wonderful fantastic voyage. It's a game that has a lot of depth and it
explores the little red riding hood myth through a number of different characters, they each
have their own version of the story. 47% of game-players are women, about 12% of the game
industry is female. We really feel like this show provides roll models for girls. A lot
of women will quit because they just don't like being in a locker room all day. Companies
need to take a little more measures to decrease sexual harassment, trash-talking, other sorts
of behavior that deters women. The specific kind of work that women have done to diversify
what games are and to kind of broaden the approach in the kinds of experiences they
create are essential to getting people really engaged in playing games. A lot of the games
that end up getting a lot of media attention, these kind of larger triple A titles, they're
tailored towards a young male audience in terms of themes and in terms of kind of the
accessibility of them. That's kind of why it's valuable to get women particularly involved
in first of all talking about the games that they like to play and also getting involved
in making them. Part of what we want to do with a show like this is to start to celebrate
the women who do get involved and the types of games and works that they actually make.
That is a powerful incentive. Anything that you would be interested in I think that the
show hopefully can give you somebody to connect with where you can say you know I really like
stories and these are the particular games that speak to me and maybe encourage me to
either seek out more games like this or to create a game like that myself. Why would
you want to exclude half your market? The vast majority of people who do microtransactions,
games like that, are female. So even though the gender mix of the players might not be
equal the actual monetary benefit is coming from women. Doesn't make any sense to say
oh, 52% of the population we don't care about them, we're not going to take their money.
It makes business sense as well as it's just the better more ethical way to do it. I know
that people are going to walk into the show and see a great number of works that they
would not have thought of when they think of games. We've pulled together this king
of possibility space where women are kind of celebrated as sort of major creative contributors
to games. And what people take away from that is whatever kind of connections and things
that they see, that we've kind of provided this ground for people to come in and kind
of build their own conclusions and make their own interpretations.