Yesterday at 9:50, Luke Crane (@Burning_Luke) asked "Why are there so few lady game creators?" on Twitter. A bit of background, Luke Crane is a the game project specialist at Kickstarter, and he only has 1,820 followers. With less than 2,000 followers, let alone those who actually read the initial message, a huge response took only 24 hours.
15 tweets were featured on Mashable about the subject, including "#1reasonwhy Because every woman I know has a story about being verbally or physically harassed when we dared to attend an event on our own." from robinyang. Currently on Twitter, while taking the 5 minutes to write this, there are 48 new tweets on the subject.
In 24 hours, gaming and non-gaming fans, misogynists and feminists, marketers, developers, PR people, (hopefully) HR, have taken notice of this underbelly of a culture. All with a small influencer asking a simple question. This was not the head of Sony Entertainment, EA sports, Ubisoft, even Zynga. This was a head of a gaming division within a fundraising website. By the way, since I finished writing this paragraph, there were 36 more on top of the 48.
Now, this story has a great deal of people who could be interested in this, after all gaming is a $65 billion industry. But just a small example of the power of social media, and the snowballing of information. 14 new tweets.
By the way, going through this list, these are my reasons why I'm choosing to not go into the video game industry. Personally, I can't imagine being comfortable at a convention, representing my company as a marketer/developer/producer when I've been to gaming conventions and felt chased out. Number two, the gaming industry is highly volatile, but that's almost negligible. 20 new tweets.
http://mashable.com/2012/11/27/1reasonwhy/
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