I recently was given the opportunity to interview Jill Duffy, editor for the Game Career Guide. Her job is to bring guidance and information to aspiring game developers, so if you fall into that category, listen up! Even if you’re not interested in getting into game development, Jill has a lot of interesting things to say about the state of the industry as well as the challenges and rewards of teaching others about it. Enjoy!
Alex Raymond: How did you get started working at GameCareerGuide and Game Developer magazine? The publications have slightly different aims and audiences; how is editing for each of them different?
Jill Duffy: My background is in writing and editing, and my undergraduate degree is in English literature. Since my professional career started, I’ve always worked in some kind of publishing.
I used to work for a business and technology trade magazine at the same company that owns Game Developer and GameCareerGuide.com, CMP Media, which is now Think Services (United Business Media is the global name). Then I left the company to work for a newspaper, but realized I liked magazine work much better, so I came back.
From my previous experience at the company, I had heard good things about the Game Group. The Game Group is the team at the company that runs the Game Developers Conference and also owns Gamasutra.com. At the time, Game Developer magazine was looking to hire an assistant editor who had strong journalistic and reporting skills, and I fit that bill really well. I didn’t have any game knowledge, really, but I figured I could pick up that content along the way. The other editors–at the time they were Jamil Moledina, Kenneth Wong, and Peter Sheerin–helped connect me to the right people in the field to interview. Over time, I developed my own contacts in the game industry, and those people help keep me up to speed on whatís happening.
When I started at Game Developer magazine, I was assistant editor. That was in May 2004. By the end of the year, I had become managing editor. It was just a matter of my skills fitting into what needed to be done with the magazine.
Game Developer is a trade magazine for professionals who are already working in the video game industry. However, we got a lot of email from people who were not working developers, people who looked us up because they were interested in becoming professional game developers. We already had an annual special issue of the magazine, the Career Guide (which is free online this year) and that special issue became the thing I most looked forward to doing at work. I feel like I identify with students who know exactly what it is they want to do in life, but don’t know how to get there. All my life, I have know I wanted to work in writing in some capacity, but when I was 14 or 15 years old, I didn’t really know what it meant. I think the Career Guide readership is in the same boat. They have questions about their future career, but they don’t actually know what those questions are.
I had learned so much in my years working for Game Developer, learning about video game development myself, that I felt like I had the kinds of answers those readers were looking for.
GameCareerGuide.com launched about two years ago, and I have been the editor-in-chief now for one year, since July 2007.
Editing for them isn’t all that different. GameCareerGuide.com has a more general audience than Game Developer. The magazine tends to be a little more technical, but we take into account the fact that not all the readers are programmers, so we always try to make sure there is a framework in every article that allows non-programmers to read at least some of it and understand it. It’s really a matter of how much you assume your audience knows. The GameCareerGuide.com readers are pretty technically savvy, but we try to have a good amount of content that will be completely unintimidating to newcomers, too.
For example, we ran an article called “What is a Game Engine” because I don’t think we should assume that the readers really know what a game engine is. It’s a term that’s thrown around so much and so often that newcomers might feel stupid asking someone to explain what it means. We just ran an article this week (July 22, 2008) called “Iterative Design” because again we don’t want to assume people really know what that term means. We want to break it down fully and make it completely unintimidating.
AR: You’ve said that people often find it hard to believe that you are neither a gamer nor do you have an interest in game development. Was there anything in particular that drew you to GameCareerGuide outside of its focus on games?
JD: Like I mentioned before, I feel like I really identify with students who know exactly what it is they want to do in life, but don’t know how to get there. I also feel like I can defend someone who says, “No one in my family or life thinks making video games is a credible job.” People say the same thing about English majors. If you’re not going to be a teacher, what are you going to do? There’s a joke: What does an English major say upon graduating? “Would you like fries with that?”
Many people are uninformed about the job prospects in the game industry, too. It makes me feel good to validate these students and other aspiring game developers and tell them, “Yes! It is okay to do this! If you know what you’re getting into and adequately prepare yourself for this line of work, you can do it!”
To briefly address the first part of your question, the more I am involved in or learn about certain aspects of game development, the more I see where I do fit in. I am a puzzler. I like crossword puzzles and word puzzles. I like sudoku. I like hangman and trivia and Jeopardy. Games encompass a huge range of things.
And it’s not like I have zero exposure to video games. I probably have about an average amount. I had a Nintendo Entertainment System when I was a kid, and my brother and I shared a GameBoy. In college, I played a lot of Mario Kart. For a good six months of my life, all my downtime at work was devoted to Snood.
AR: Do many of your co-workers game? Has working at GameCareerGuide turned you on to any games?
JD: I think it’s safe to say that all my editorial co-workers play games and follow the video game industry not just for work, but as a personal hobby.
I’m not playing anything at new the moment. The only game I’ve been into lately is Facebook’s Scrabulous application, but that’s not through GameCareerGuide.com.
AR: Do you consider yourself a feminist? How does that affect your work?
JD: Wow! That is a leading question if I ever heard one!
There are multiple types of feminism, and no one even agrees on what they are. Some people look at the three waves of feminism. Some people talk about radical or separatist feminists versus social versus liberal versus reformist…
AR: Do you think women face any additional challenges to breaking into the game industry? What about advantages?
JD: I don’t think women face additionally challenges, per se, but it’s a complex issue that in my mind goes back to education.
I did some research about the IT and other technology sectors about two years ago and found that women who work in IT often arrived at that job by earning their degrees by and large not in computer science or IT, but in other sciences, especially biology or psychology, where the classrooms tended to be more gender balanced. (Let me note that the research I read was all conducted between about 1994 and 2002, so even since then, times have changed.)
What that little bit of research told me was women can and do get jobs in technology-based careers, but they do it slightly unconventionally. However, game programming is a specific enough field that it’s much harder to get into that job with unconventional educational background.
You have to learn C++ to become a game programmer. And sure, people self-learn occasionally, but if you’re enrolled in a full-time, four-year university, the best place to learn C++ is probably in a computer science or engineering curriculum. Now if we have female students avoiding computer science and engineering classes due to gender imbalance in the classroom (which according to the research also has to do with communication styles between classmates), then we probably have them being better prepared for other kinds of jobs. From game industry data I’ve seen, women better represented as businesspeople and producers in the game industry than programmers. For example, only about 3 percent of all game programmers are female, whereas it’s 18 percent in business and 18 percent in production.
You can’t just recruit women into programming jobs. First they need to have a strong education in math and science. Then they need to learn programming, or systems architecture, or engineering. If women are not going into those fields of study in large numbers, there isn’t a talent pool to recruit from.
My hunch is that this is all changing dramatically right now, with students who are already in university. In a few more years when they finish their degrees and advanced degrees and graduate, and as more women slowly go into these fields of study, there will be more women with educational backgrounds in technology, math, and the so-called hard sciences (as opposed to life sciences).
AR: In August, you ran a “Women in Games” week at GameCareerGuide. What were your goals for this and what kind of response did you receive? Why is it important to you to highlight women in game development?
JD: Yes. For one week in August, all the articles were themed on “women and games,” rather than “women in games.” It turned out to be pretty pared down in the end, and that was a good thing. The readership responded in a way that I didn’t really expect, which is to say that a majority of people felt like they had been bashed over the head all their lives with multiculturalism and gender sensitivity, and that when it comes to game design and game development, they’d rather talk about games than diversity issues.
And that’s fair. The focus of GameCareerGuide.com is game development learning and education. As it turns out, the readers want to keep that focus pretty tight. That’s absolutely legit.
The goal was to promote more dialogue about gender imbalance in the industry–which it did to some extent–but in the end the readers said they weren’t looking for that kind of focus from our site.
One of the great things about having a community forum on a web site (which we do, and it’s free) is that we can receive very direct feedback from readers. That’s not to say we don’t have a “vocal minority, silent majority” imbalance, but even the number of page views and site hits reflects the fact that our readers want to know first and foremostly about game development, careers in game development, and issues related to game development education.
For me personally, it’s still important to talk about the gender imbalance that exists not only in the business of video games, but in most businesses in the United States. Women are paid less for equal work. Women are passed up for job promotions when they are qualified. Women who take time off work to bear or raise children are often set back in their career paths because of it. Women who need to pump breast milk at work very often don’t have a private place to do so. The reason it’s even more important to raise these issues among game developers is because roughly 90 percent of the industry is male and as a result, the majority of the employees and the majority of people running the companies are not personally affected by these problems. If they are not personally affect, they are not fully aware how these issues do affect people personally and professionally, both daily and in the long term.
When straight “men” (and I mean that in a stereotypical way) talk about interpersonal relationships, they often joke that they “are not mind-readers” and need women to be more explicit about what it is they want and need. When these same “men” are running a business, are they suddenly privy to the needs of women? I ask that half in jest. Also, I think the reverse is true for women. If a woman is in a relationship and realizes she has to say, explicitly, “I need you to tell me more often how you feel about me,” or, “I’m really looking for a relationship that will lead to marriage within the next three years,” then women should also be held accountable in the business world for annunciating what it is they want: “I would like to have a personal review this month because I need more feedback and praise about my achievements”; “My goal for this job is to be promoted away from production and into design within two years.”
AR: Any advice for women trying to break into game development?
JD: My advice to all people who want to work in game development is threefold: study, network, and do. Figure out which area of game development you want to go into and get an education that is right for you. Network with game industry professionals–networking is one of those things that, if you’re not in the industry, you just have to trust people like me and realize that we’re saying this over and over again a for a reason! “Do” means take your education and your skills and output something. The game industry likes to measure job candidates by what they have created, whether itís a playable game demo a piece of artwork, a pen and paper game, or a new template for scheduling student game project development.
To women, specifically, I don’t have any special advice other than to be competitive in that job market!
AR: What are your favorite hobbies?
JD: I write and read a bit, and I love to cook, and talk about and write about food. When I travel, I like to visit farmer’s markets in different cities. I’m kind of a recreational walker, to borrow Jonathan Franzen’s description, though lately I’ve been swimming because it’s been too hot to walk in the city. I live near an enormous old, outdoor pool built in 1936 for the Olympic time trials, and to me it’s really special to be able to swim there.
AR: What are you most passionate about as a writer?
JD: As a writer, I’m most passionate about giving the reader something interesting and worthwhile. That might entail providing new information, new insight, or humor. I really care very deeply about whether the readers on GameCareerGuide.com get what they need. Some of them need concrete information, like which course of study best might best suit their educational goals, while others need reassurance that they are on the right path to achieving their future careers.
As a hobby, I write a blog about food. There, I like to have some posts that make people laugh, some that teach them something new about food, and some that get them to debate or discuss an issue.
That’s another thing I try to do with GameCareerGuide.com, too: inspire people to discuss issues rather than just lay them on the line. I hope the site gives people the information they’re seeking or resources to find additional information, and then also fosters discussion on those topics so the readers can discover and create new information as well.
Tags: video games, women in the industry
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