Scottish culture minister: we need more women in games development

Scottish culture minster Fiona Hyslop chats with young game developers at the Protoplay festival in Dundee. Photograph: Elliot Smith

Scottish culture minister Fiona Hyslop has spoken out about the lack of women taking up creative roles in the games industry. While attending the Protoplay indie gaming festival in Dundee on Thursday, the MSP for Linlithgow stated that more needed to be done to attract young girls into game development.

"I'm very keen to make sure we counter this drift toward a male-dominated environment," said Hyslop. "We need to tackle the concept of women in gaming: women play games, but we want them to create games, we don't want them to be just consumers."

The problem, says Hyslop, is in the teaching of science and maths subjects at an early age. "A lot of it is about the wider education system, about STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] subjects and how we encourage young girls to be interested early enough," she said. "I've already made statements in parliament about our intention to tackle this; we need to make sure primary school teachers, most of whom are women, are comfortable with programming. We need to try to get girls interested early. The government in Scotland is very committed to this – the employment minister Angela Constance has been meeting with people in the industry and looking into how we can promote that."

The annual Protoplay event is organised by the University of Abertay to showcase the finalists in its Dare to Be Digital games development competition. Students from all over the world are encouraged to enter game concepts. The teams with the most promising pitches are then invited to stay in Dundee for nine weeks to develop their ideas into playable prototypes. Around 10,000 members of the public are expected to attend the event, which takes place in Dundee city centre, and also features talks and presentations by local game developers.

The paucity of women game developers has become a major issue in the industry. Research by Develop magazine earlier this year found that only 6% of UK development staff are women and that, on average, they earn ￡3000 less than male counterparts. Everything from the once geeky image of games to the lack of role models in the technology sector has been blamed.

Although the image of gaming is improving, thanks partly to the ubiquity of smartphones, which have made games more widely available, female developers attending the Protoplay event have come up against familiar barriers. "I always got my brother's hand-me-down computers – it was seen as a boy's thing when I was growing up," says Sophia George, who is about to take up a new position as the Victoria and Albert Museum's game developer in residence. "I said no, I want to do it. We can't give up!"

Game developers Sophia George and Erin Michno: 'There are exciting things happening'

Erin Michno is co-founder of experimental development studio Quartic Llama and has helped run programming courses using the cheap Raspberry Pi computer. "I was the only woman on my games technology course in the entire year. It's such a shame. And afterwards I'd run into women who would say, 'Oh, I wish I could have done that'. It's about getting the knowledge out earlier on.

"There are exciting things happening though. The girl scouts of America have a games programming badge. That's about encouraging girls at a really young age. You don't have to wait until university to start learning about game development. There are things like the MIT Game Lab and Scratch, that's programming for seven-year-olds, and then there's Raspberry Pi which has organised programming events.

"You get people saying, 'Oh, I don't know how to programme', so you just say, 'Okay, well, what do you want to make?' Don't make it about the maths or science, because it can be a bit intimidating, it's more about: what do you want to create? We can show you how to do that. That way people find out, 'No wait, maths is awesome, I can use it to make stuff!'"

Part of Sophia George's role at the V&A will be talking to school children about game development and design – she sees mentoring as a vital element of getting more girls into games. "I hope more women game developers are open to it," she said. "I don't feel like I had any role models growing up."

In the US, a Twitter storm over industry sexism last year led to the formation of the #1reasonmentors hashtag, which has allowed newcomers to contact established women developers. "There is a greater community now," said Michno. "Even a few years ago it was harder to find mentors, you had to do more digging. Now it's much easier to say, 'Yeah, that's who I want to be like'."

For Hyslop, Protoplay is part of the process of communicating the benefits and rewards of a career in game development. "I'm delighted there are talks on women in gaming here," she said. "It's fantastic that developers are going to be working with primary school teachers who have never done programming, so how are they going to inspire the next generation, and particularly girls?"

Stephanie Bazeley, an entrant in this year's Dare to be Digital game design competition: 'Girls should just go for it'

On the show floor, where the competition entrants show off their games to the public, there is an upbeat mood among the large number of female students and graduates who have joined competing teams. Stephanie Bazeley is the programmer on a team named Prehistoric Spatula, showing off a promising augmented-reality iPad game called Dinersaur.

"I actually wanted to do a different course, but when I visited Abertay I thought, 'You know what? I could do gaming'," she said. "It's been the best four years of my life. I discovered games through my old Dreamcast, but at the time I never considered what went into creating them. It's amazing. Girls should just go for it."

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Propaganda war: who will win Scottish teenage hearts and minds?

Pupils at Glasgow’s Douglas Academy debate Scotland’s independence ahead of next year’s vote. Photograph: Martin Hunter

Rosie Duthie and Euan MacIntosh, both 15, have made up their minds on how they plan to vote in next year's referendum on Scottish independence. For Euan the answer is a clear "yes" because he believes it will be his best guarantee of a free university education. Rosie is a "no". She says: "We should be arguing that what we think is better for the future of young people in Scotland is better for England too and for the European Union."

Next year these young people from Douglas academy in the salubrious Glaswegian suburb of Milngavie will be among the first 16-year-olds in the UK mainland ever to vote. It appears that, like Rosie and Euan, many are taking their role in the process very seriously. It is a change that will bring politics into classrooms and canteens. People on both sides of the border will be watching closely the success or failure of extending the franchise to schoolchildren.

Some, like the Scotland Office minister David Mundell, claim the turnout among teenagers will be small because only middle-class children will bother to get themselves on the young people's voting register, which will remain confidential to avoid making children's addresses public.

But the move has widespread support in the Scottish parliament, with the first draft of the bill to give 16-year-olds a vote in the referendum passing last week on a vote of 97 to 12. The Liberal Democrats are committed to widening the franchise to all elections, and Labour is considering whether to include it in its manifesto for the 2015 election.

The leader of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, has said it may be "dispiriting and depressing" for young people who vote in the referendum to find they are then denied a vote in the general election a few months later.

The vote is something the 20-year-old vice-chair of the Scottish youth parliament, Kyle Thornton, and many others across the UK have lobbied hard for. "We have been campaigning for a decade and we will be working really hard to get people to register; we will be going in to schools and motivating the young people to make sure they are on the register … This is an opportunity to create a politically aware generation.

Thornton has now left Bellahouston academy in Glasgow, but he says: "In my last two years at school there was a general election, a European election, a council election and a Scottish election. There was an irony that we couldn't vote – I think we were as well qualified as any adult."

For teachers, the next academic year will be challenging as they try to ensure a fair hearing for both sides and to contain the massive lobbying effort that is likely to reach schools. Both sides of the debate are recruiting hundreds of teen ambassadors to take their arguments into schools, preparing teachers' packs, and offering speakers and visits. There is likely to be some mediation by the Electoral Commission in this new electoral battleground.

Emma Hendry, principal of modern studies at Elgin academy, is already debating the issues with year 9s and upwards. She says: "They are excited or at least interested in the idea that they will have a vote and that it will be about a decision that is so important to their future … I think they will be at least as well-informed as most adults because they are still in the education system and will have opportunities to hear the arguments."

Hendry herself is undecided. "The young people ask me how I will vote. I can honestly tell them I haven't made up my mind yet."

At Douglas academy, pupils are in training for STV (central Scotland's ITV franchise) and the national debating competition Debating Matters on independence. The school won a regional final of the Debating Matters championship this year and deputy head Stephen Sinclair is planning a series of debates on the issues around independence.

During the heats, teams will debate questions such as whether an independent Scotland should keep the pound. The last, televised, round will be on the referendum question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"

Teenagers who have already volunteered to represent either side are accessing training and creating political relationships and CVs that could stand them in good stead for their future careers. Michael Low, 17, a sixth-year pupil at Bishopbriggs academy in Glasgow who has a conditional offer to study politics at Oxford next year, has already attended a session with someone from the Obama campaign.

"There is a lot of discussion in school, informally," he says. "People know I am a Better Together [the pro-UK campaign] youth rep and they can ask me about particular issues, or they can ask me for badges and other campaign material."

Meanwhile, the yes campaign aims to recruit 10,000 youth ambassadors. Ellie Koepplinger, 16, from Glasgow's Hillhead high, is on the yes campaign board. She says: "I feel my teachers are quite opinionated, and are willing to discuss independence when prompted, but most won't go out of their way to have that discussion with pupils. However, I strongly feel that many pupils are interested in the debate, and want to know more."

She wants to help counter some of the information teenagers share on social media, which can at times be "wildly unrealistic".

Like Low, Koepplinger believes in votes at 16 for all elections. She says young people like "the thought that we could actually make a difference to something. It will allow us to hold our heads up higher to say that we have proved we are able to take part in something like this."

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