“It’s not something that someone tells you clearly or overtly,” Shabir told The Washington Post. “It’s just something you hear and internalize over time.”
This subtle reinforcement of gender roles and restrictions around who exactly gets to enjoy particular hobbies inspired Shabir to start Girls Make Games, a summer camp where girls and non-binary kids learn all the basics of game development, from coding to concept art illustration. The camp is hosted by LearnDistrict, an educational media company founded by Shabir and Ish Syed. During the camp’s three-week curriculum, they work in groups with the goal of producing their own video games for publication.
This year, GMG offered three on-site camp locations in San Mateo, Seattle and Bellevue, Washington. Every year, GMG selects the best student project to get crowdfunded, developed and published. Shabir said GMG has published 11 student games so far, some of which are featured on GMG’s website.
The camp grew out of Shabir’s own experience in game development. Before co-founding LearnDistrict with the intention of making educational video games, Shabir worked in finance, another famous male-dominated field. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shabir interned with Merrill Lynch before moving on to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and BlackRock.
But Shabir said none of those spaces came close to the gender inequality she saw in the video game industry. When she posted hiring announcements for her small indie game studio, the applicants were predominantly male.
“When I posted the job apps, it was like 90 percent of men and guys applied and said this was my dream job doing this,” Shabir said. “But I’ve never had women say I’d love to make an educational game.”
LearnDistrict eventually grew to eight employees, but Shabir was the only woman. When Shabir tried to head-hunt qualified women, she met resistance from both men and women. People told her that there just aren’t enough women working in games and games aren’t something that women are usually interested in. It took her five years to convince her own sister Isra Shabir, a fellow student at MIT with a degree in computer science. to join LearnDistrict.
Shabir attributed this difficulty to a confluence of factors, but one of the biggest was the cultural assumption that video games are a masculine pastime with content aimed at a male audience. When girls don’t play games, Shabir wondered why she was making educational games that would only be played by boys. So she started Girls Make Games in 2014 as a research project: what if she asked a bunch of gamer girls what kind of games they like and what games they want to see?
“I wanted to get to know them,” Shabir said. “And that was it. Frankly, a social experiment.”
That social experiment has mentored more than 22,000 children and collaborated with industry giants such as Nintendo, PlayStation and Ubisoft, according to GMG’s 2021 report. Many of the campers are now veterans who have been attending for years, calling it a great way to gain experience. and strengthen their university applications. But it is also a summer camp. That means friendship and fun.
“The community is honestly one of the best parts,” said Vanessa Meza, a 15-year-old camper who has been visiting GMG for five years. “Everyone is very nice. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what you like to do. It’s just a good, safe space for everyone to just come in and relax and play games together.”
This year, some GMG students went to camp at the Crystal Dynamics offices in San Mateo. Crystal Dynamics is the current developer of the Tomb Raider franchise, starring world-reaching archaeologist Lara Croft, one of the game’s most prominent heroines. Crystal Dynamics studio head Scot Amos described the developer’s partnership with GMG as an extension of the company’s core values, pointing out that two of Crystal Dynamics’ co-founders, Judy Lang and Madeline Canepa, were women. Amos touted GMG as a launch pad for helping budding game makers, especially those who love games but have no idea how to make their own games.
“If you didn’t have Girls Make Games, would they even have a place to know how to get a game engine and start making something?” asked Amos. “Sure, you could go to YouTube if you knew what to look for. And you’d say, is it a good one? Is it a bad one? Do I know what I’m looking for?”
GMG students are encouraged to create whatever they want. Shabir says messaging is an important part of the curriculum. Rather than pointing out the lack of women in the industry, Shabir focuses on the value they bring. When girls are unknowingly told to get involved in game development to level the ranks, they may feel like numbers in a corporate diversity report.
“Constantly reminding them that there aren’t many women in the industry can go the other way,” Shabir said. “No, it’s more like, you know what, women make great games. So we want your game. They get excited about that.”
It’s an inspiring principle for campers like 9-year-old Rena Foulds. Foulds currently enjoys the hit platformer “Stray” and the samurai action-adventure “Ghost of Tsushima” (in the Japanese dub, no less), but she got to create her own game at this year’s GMG. Her project, “The Amazing World of Cake”, is about three animals trying to collect the ingredients to bake a cake while dealing with thieves and mischievous birds. When asked how she came up with the idea, her answer was exactly in line with GMG’s learning philosophy: make the game you want.
“Me and my friends love cake,” Foulds said. “And we gradually made it up. And for the characters we used a cheetah, a dog and a tiger, because those are our favorite animals.”
Shabir believes that video games can have a profound, lifelong impact. As a medium, video games can be uniquely enjoyed as a pastime, an icebreaker for parties, a competition or a work of art. On an episode of VH1’s “I Love the ’90s,” John Mayer discussed how video game music plays its own music and scatted tracks from “Super Mario Bros.” deeply inspired. note for note. Shabir compared video games to books in that games had the power to influence her way of thinking and her perspective.
And that’s a strength that should be shared with everyone, she said.
“It makes sense that kids are attracted to video games because anything that games represent, kids like,” Shabir said. “If we want to reach people, if we want to make a difference, I think video games have a huge social impact and we need to use that collectively. Not only on an individual level, but also as a society and as an employer.”
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