More women are becoming game developers, but there’s a long way to go
When 47% of video gamers in Australia are female, we must consider why so few women are employed to make the games they play.
28 Jul 2017 12:00
Brooke Maggs
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Digital
Render from Tearaway Unfolded 2015, directed by Siobhan Reddy, published by Media Molecule and featured in ACMI’s Codebreakers exhibition.
Recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows a rise in the number of women working in the Australian games industry. In 2011-2012, only 8.7% of game developers identified as female, with that amount almost doubling to 15% in 2015-2016. Still, to put this in perspective, the ABS recorded just 734 people working in the industry as of June 2016.
Brooke Maggs is a writer, researcher, and a narrative and game designer. She has over seven years of experience teaching user experience design, cultural studies and game studies at a tertiary level. Her area of research is in the importance of games and play in creative writing practice and the intersections between traditional and digital storytelling.
Brooke's current projects include writing, narrative designing and producing for an adventure puzzle game, The Gardens Between, and writing and narrative designing for Earthlight, a virtual reality game about the wonders and perils of space.
