Jun 17 2007
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.