GDC2010: Microsoft Women in Gaming Awards

Yesterday I attended the Microsoft WiG luncheon. Microsoft had invited Jade Raymond and Peter Molyneux to give keynotes at the luncheon. Jade's talk highlighted the role of mentoring when pursuing a courier in games business and that mentoring and learning from seniors (as well as applying good practices from other industries) is the only way to become a leading expert in game business. Peter talked about the necessity of diversity. The games as just as good as the development team behind it. Naturally what counts when building a team is the skill set. Many companies do not understand that besides essential skills in game development, personal viewpoints, preferences, experiences and thoughts are also very valuable. In relation to that one of my own favorite example of identifying new potential is Shigeru Miyamoto's Wife-o-Meter. With Wife-o-Meter Miyamoto gauges product's potential success with an expanded audience. The point is that some things might not be interesting or sensible from his personal viewpoint but without his Wife-o-Meter method Nintendogs and Wii games might have never been invented. The same wisdom goes for game development teams.

IGDA Women in Games SIG is also providing online mentorship program. Karen Clark (Sr. Project Manager, EA) is the chair of the mentoring program.

Between the talks the following ladies were awarded as winners in the following categories. I was honored to be a member of the jury.

Art: Amy Beth Christianson, Principal Artist at LucasArts

Design: Jenna Chalmers, Creative Director for Zynga

Engineering: Corrinne Yu, Principal Engine Programmer at Microsoft Game Studios

Production: Megan Gaiser, President/CEO at Her Interactive

Lifetime Achievement Award: Amy Hennig, Creative Director for Naughty Dog

At the expo floor Sony presented their Move controller and 3D stereoscopic gaming. Notice the game on the screen (!) --that's Super Stardust HD by Housemarque. I am not too excited of either Move or 3D gaming. Still it is clear that at the moment Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all seem to be moving to the same direct ion and trying to catch players' attention by focusing on social and functional gaming. Similarly there is a clear consensus in SNSs (Facebook gaming) as well. Zynga model of developing social games for the Facebook seems to be the way to go. I am hoping to see someone to push the envelope. There is still a lot to be invented.