Case Study

“Girls Make Games” Explodes to Fill Developer Gender Gap

By Anna Jordan-Douglass

Introduction

sUlITotsA year ago, Girls Make Games didn’t exist. Now, the project by LearnDistrict that teaches girls the ins and outs of game development has one big goal: “We want to teach 1 million girls how to make games by 2020.”

Laila Shabir, founder of Girls Make Games and Learn District, is determined to meet that goal.

She has a history of achieving difficult goals. Growing up in UAE, her family couldn’t afford to send her to high school, so she searched the Internet for curriculum and homeschooled herself. Eventually she discovered that she could apply to universities in the United States and that there were programs for financial aid, and she ended up at MIT.

“It’s important to educate both the girls and their families, and society for that matter, about the powers of game making.”

— Laila Shabir, founder of Girls Make Games

An Unexpected Movement

After a stint on Wall Street, “because I was a poor economics graduate with debt, and I wanted to help my family,” Shabir went back to school at The Brookings Institution.

There she met Ish Syed, who is now her husband. Syed had an interesting side job – he played Halo professionally.

“I was really intrigued by how much he enjoyed it and how he said it made his motor skills better and his driving better, because he was so good at Halo. And weeks and months go by and I watch him as he plays different games, and after every game he plays, he actually does improve – his problem solving skills, and his critical thinking skills, and I’m thinking, this is really something.”

Something clicked for Shabir. She believed that he should be making video games. So they spent a few weekends brainstorming, put plans to pursue PhDs on hold, and LearnDistrict was born.

VIDEO: GIRLS MAKE GAMES

The new company aimed “to find common ground between the stalwart principles of education and the world of gaming.”

Like many independent game startups, LearnDistrict turned to Kickstarter to fund its first game, Penguemic, which aims to help players learn vocabulary frequently found on the SAT/GRE/GMAT exams. Its delayed release can really be traced to one tweet.

“Girls Make Games was not planned as part of our first year of being an educational games company. We stumbled onto it because I was trying to grow our team – it was myself and four other guys, just like every other games studio. I went on a female developer hunt, and it was impossible,” Shabir said.

She found that of the few women developers that are out there, larger tech companies were courting most of them with the promise of steady employment. “Women look at jobs a little differently – they are a lot more risk adverse. You have to take all these things into consideration.”

So she decided to do two things: show that working at a game studio can be really cool, and raise awareness among parents and families.

But she added that she also had to consider how young women entering the workforce are different then their male counterparts. She said she believes that girls more often look to their families and parents for approval. “It’s important to educate both the girls and their families, and society for that matter about the powers of game making.”

Going to Camp

VIDEO: KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

Her next step was to start a small camp in the San Francisco area. She sent one little Tweet that was re-Tweeted over and over again. They were looking for 20 students for the first class, and had 50 registered within a week.

The inaugural camp, which was held last July in the Bay Area, had a three-week curriculum, and focused on three main areas: game design, art and programming. The goal of the camp was to have everyone make a game prototype using development tools – Stencyl for beginners, or Unity for the more advanced campers – and then decide what they want their focus to be from there.

Campers range in age from 10-16, but have been as young as 7 and up to 17. In camp, they are segregated by skill level, not age. “We had a lot of 10-year-olds who were very good, and 16-year-olds who were programming for the first time,” Shabir said.

People began writing from other cities wanting camps. So Shabir took her camps to Boston, then Sydney and Melbourne. This summer, just one year from that inaugural camp, she’ll be holding multiple camps in 19 cities across the country.

Her team at Learn District created the camp curriculum and experience. She works with local volunteers who have education or programming experience to implement the camps, spending two days training them on the camp curriculum.

“One of the reasons parents told us that their kids enjoyed their time at the camp so much is that it wasn’t just the classroom stuff. The whole camp was a game itself,” said Shabir. For example, for doing well you could earn gold tokens to buy things from the store. “It got the girls really excited and was something they hadn’t seen from other camps,” she added.

“The groups of five to six girls aged 10 and 16 have less than three weeks to brainstorm a game, write a design document, learn to program, solicit freelance music and art, polish and then test their creation. And then they have to sell their idea to a panel of experts.”

— Polygon on Girls Make Games

Teaching the Business

Game prototypes aren’t all the kids learned during camp. They got an introduction to the business of games as well.

“The camp did a lot more than teach how to make games – now they know how to run a studio. They had to come up with revenue shares with each other,” said Shabir.

The teams presented their projects at a Demo Day and the Grand Prize Winner, a game called The Hole Story, went to Kickstarter to raise money to “let the girls continue to work on The Hole Story, hire professional artists, musicians, and programmers, and publish a very pretty and complete version of their vision.” Their goal was $10,000, and they raised over $30,000.

VIDEO: THE HOLE STORY

They were chosen as a Kickstarter Staff Pick, and garnered a number of articles on sites like IGN, Gamasutra and Mashable.

Shabir said putting the game on Kickstarter motivated the campers by making it real. She added that girls from the Bay Area camp are still working on their game and submitting progress reports in hopes of getting the project on Kickstarter.

“Initially, I thought it would be nice if we taught the girls how Kickstarter works, but I didn’t expect it to become the central point that everyone looks at as the measure of success in a way,” she said.

So why did one Tweet prompt such a reaction that continues to grow?

Shabir said the answer is simple.

“People actually want this, and it’s not happening. There are not enough resources for these girls,” she said, adding, “Around the middle school age, it’s so important to give the girls the confidence they need, and give them a space where they can blurt out whatever they want without being mocked.”

To see the cities and dates of this summer’s camps, visit their website.