Jun 17
This could be an issue
Microsoft Canada held a conference called EnergizeIT in Toronto yesterday that I had the pleasure of attending. The conference was to showcase some of Microsoft’s new technologies to an enthusiast crowd. There were multiple streams that each attendee could participate in — from security, to networking, and finally, to game development, the one that I decided to go to.
The game development stream showcased, mostly, Microsoft’s new XNA framework, which is freely available and allows individuals to write fairly complex DirectX-based games in C# with little effort. These games can then play on your Windows-based PC or on an Xbox 360. This framework is exciting news, and the fact that Microsoft is taking a more proactive approach to game development is a good sign.
However, out of a room of about 60 people, approximately 5 were female, which isn’t a good sign that the game development world is including a whole lot of women. The XNA community, as well, doesn’t appear to have a lot of women developers, either — too bad.
June 18th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
[…] This could be an issue […]
June 18th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
[…] This could be an issue […]
June 18th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
[…] today. I was pleased to see that at least two U of T students went and blogged about their impressions (and the gender ratio: about 5 out of 60 in one session). Anyone else get […]
June 21st, 2007 at 10:07 am
[…] This could be an issue […]
August 26th, 2008 at 10:14 am
My daughter was at that convention in toronto and her team consists of four girls and their team was Fatal Attraction. I don’t know where you came up with only about 5 girl gamers. There not as recognized but I think the deserve some credit.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Sorry, our event was the MLG Halo 3 competition and it was an amazing event.