Beyond the Brunette Online
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 12:19PM I've put my slides up from SXSWi 2010 for my talk, ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette. I'm not embedding it here, however, because the slides are pretty worthless without my presentation notes, and I haven't worked out a way to get show the slides to display in the way I'd prefer. It's harder than it needs to be because I have embedded video, and Keynote's cutting off a bunch of pie charts when I export to PDF. Grrr. At any rate, I highly recommend you be sure to click on the "Notes on slide 1" tab before you start going through the show.
I do believe SXSW is planning to put up the audio of my actual talk at some point, and when that happens I'll try to put the slides and audio together in a single, perfect show. Until then, we'll all have to settle.
Reader Comments (6)
It was really a super, thought-provoking talk.
Also, the audio will be up although sometimes it takes a few months :) I have an RSS feed so if I see it, I'll tell you.
I really enjoyed your slides...When we were making Must Love Robots we were constantly bumping up against gender issues. It is really difficult to write for a female character, and not slide head first into problems. We circumvented a lot of the issues by collaborating our writing with Courtney our actress (redhead). She kept us in check if we ever wanted her character to do something that was not especially in her character’s best interest.
However, when you boil our plot down we still fall into some stereotypical cliques… they are so hard to get away from. Thanks for shedding light onto the topic. You know that our field is cementing itself when you can have a conversation that is deeper than “what is an ARG?” Cheers!
Jimbabb, MLR was really a lovely project, and it provokes absolutely no feminist outrage in me at all. Sweet, touching, all-around well done. It's even better to know this was on purpose and your hearts are in the right place. ^_^
Lex, the audio version will probably be wayyyy better. I'll be able to turn it into a movie instead. Might be months, though... FWIW, there are only the three videos in it ;)
We talked about this a bit the other night, but I do wonder about the figures for women working in ARGs because, unfortunately, that does not mirror my experience. My experience actually mirrors that of the game industry as a whole - most of the teams I've worked with have been mostly guys and, I'd bet, that if everyone I've worked with was brought into a room only about 15% would be women. I'll grant that women have had strong and leading roles, which isn't typical in the game industry, but both the creative teams and production teams are still primarily men. I'm not sure why that is, really, because it's such a friendly space for women (both creatively and professionally).
Where I do find a majority of women is in the freelance space. Which is great if that's what they want - it provides some degree of freedom but it also comes at the cost of a lack of benefits and the additional stress that freelancers have over if they'll have money coming in 4 months down the road. Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with freelancing. There are days that I wouldn't trade it for anything, but more and more I find myself yearning for the stability and camaraderie that comes with "a real job." And I wonder if guys are more prone to risk-taking, so they're more willing and eager to get involved with start-ups? But then i think of the risks involved in freelancing and I don't know.