INTRODUCTION

wundergeek Miscellany

The genesis of this blog came from an article that I wrote for See Page XX examining prevalence of sexist depictions of women in different areas of gaming. Before you read anything else here, you should really go read the article. (Yes it’s important enough to link twice.) If you find yourself wanting to argue with the article, please read this post here elucidating common arguments against my findings and clarifying some points regarding my criteria and methods.

My goal is to make this a place you can point people to regarding specific issues pertaining to sexism in gaming.

If this is your first time visiting my blog, welcome! If you don’t want to read chronologically, consider checking out this guide on how to use this blog. If you’re a feminist or ally looking for a specific post to use as a reference, then visit this guide here.

State of the Discourse: a survey of marginalized game designers on online discussion space.

wundergeek Uncategorized

In November of 2019, I published a survey and put out a call on Twitter for participants who were marginalized game designers. As someone who used to be very active on Google+ before its demise, I’ve been thinking for much of the last year about the lack of safe spaces for marginalized designers to talk about design without being drowned out, talked over, or actively pushed out by cisgender white men.

Personally, I know that I feel far more isolated from the design community, and that my ability to design games without a community to run designs by has greatly suffered. And while I know better than to assume my experience is universal (I know Google+ wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea), I also know that I am not alone in feeling that way. However, it’s next-to-impossible to talk about solutions without knowing the scope of the problem.

After several months of work (I was doing everything myself and it’s been an… interesting several months), the results have been organized, the data analyzed, and the results written about. The end product is a 28-page report, covering in detail:

  • The demographics of survey respondents
  • Usage of Google+ and commentary on its features
  • Shift over time in channels used to talk about game design online
  • Analysis of responses to sentiment questions
  • Short-answer responses – common themes and notable comments

The link to the full report can be found here! However, because not everyone has the same deep and abiding love of charts and data that I do (and why not???), this post will summarize important portions of the report.