Each year on International Women’s Day, we all come together to celebrate women, their achievements, and their accomplishments. The day came to be back in 1911 when women across Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark united to advocate for women’s rights. It’s a fascinating history and I implore you to read up on it.
International Women’s Day is incredibly important as it helps to fight against inequality and offset bias that is still prevalent in today’s society – especially in the gaming industry. However, there are some excellent organizations and groups that celebrate women all year round, invest in their ideas, and assist in making female-led projects a success.
First, I’d like to mention the Women-Led Games Showcase, running from March 8-10, showing off trailers, reveals, and gameplay from women developers all across the world. You can tune in on Women-Led Games’ Twitch and YouTube over the weekend.
There’s also Women In Games, a group of activists that believe in bringing more women into video game and esports spaces. Founded in 2009, the group has done some important research (like what percentage of the video games industry is actually made up of women) and holds many events including their own award shows and career expos. To find out more, check out the Women In Games website.
Here, we’re highlighting women-run companies, games, developers, creators, and many more roles across the industry. Let’s turn our gaze to Metacore. You’ve undoubtedly heard of Merge Mansion, Metacore’s incredibly popular mobile game, but now it’s time to learn about the team behind it.
Metacore’s New Games Marketing Lead is Sandra Fenyo. She looks after the brand’s strategy and helps to build the games in the company’s portfolio. During her time with the company, Metacore has gone from strength to strength in terms of its marketing. After previous successful celebrity crossovers, Sandra launched the iconic campaign featuring Pedro Pascal as the game’s very own detective.
Working alongside Sandra is Neha Joshi. She’s Metacore’s Game Lead and has over 12 years of experience under her belt including work on Angry Birds Friends, Trials, and South Park Phone Destroyer, making her a very knowledgeable and respectable professional.
The COO of Metacore, Anna Kaskeala-Moore, works to develop the company’s culture, among other tasks. Her goal is to show that working with video games is a viable career path, even for people who aren’t massive gamers themselves. Since she joined the company, Metacore opened its first international office and grew to over 200 employees – a delightfully large percentage of which are women.
Our next spotlight is Wooga. The game studio has a high percentage of female developers across its teams, and has a majority female audience for the games it produces – 90% of players, in fact! You may know the studio for June’s Journey, Ghost Detective, and Switchcraft – some excellent mobile games we recommend.
Recently, Wooga asked employees whether they had been inspired by fellow female members of the industry when seeking to join it – only 7% said yes. This then prompted Wooga to ask prominent female figures working in games and media to nominate heroes of theirs, to bring awareness to even more women’s achievements. The highlighted industry members include Siobhan Reddy of Media Molecule, Emily Greer of Double Loop Game and Kongregate, and Rebb Ford of Digital Extremes. You can see the full list of nominators and nominees here on Wooga’s blog.
Now, I’d like to hype up just a small selection of games made by women, for women, that feature women of all different walks of life, to widen your perspective on others’ experiences.
Unpacking
Unpacking, conceptualized and then worked on by Wren Brier, follows a female protagonist as she moves through different stages of her life and carves out a space for herself. Through the game, we unpack a lot of female-centric belongings including sanitary products and underwear, which is something I personally haven’t seen reflected much in media as a whole, let alone games.
Celeste
Celeste – brutal though the gameplay may be – has a wonderful story and message hidden beneath the challenging platformer levels. You, the player, control Madeline as she works her way up Celeste Mountain. We learn a lot about her during the game, including that Madeline is a trans woman. While working on Celeste, creator Maddy Thorson realized that she and Madeline are trans and worked it into the game with a trans pride flag featuring in a cutscene.
We Are OFK
A delightful narrative adventure, We Are OFK, follows a group of friends as they work through the struggles of being in a creative industry. The main characters are mostly female, LGBTQ+, and non-binary, allowing a lot of people to view the world and its issues from different perspectives than they would usually have.
Wylde Flowers
Wylde Flowers is one of our favorite games here at Pocket Tactics, as it’s a wonderful little life sim that lets you be who you want as you learn the ropes of being a witch. Dress how you want, romance who you want – you name it, you can do it. The team behind Wylde Flowers at Studio Drydock comprises lots of women, including founder Amanda Schofield and Alexandra Lu, the game designer.
We also did an interview with Iona Vorster and Riley Hanlin of the Wylde Flowers team, if you’d like to see their opinions on inclusivity.
Hey, guess what, I have some more organizations to draw your attention to. Wings Interactive is another stellar organization that invests in indie games with primarily female and marginalized teams. The company is also the one to set up the Women’s Day Sale on Steam, where you can grab some excellent bargains. Check out Wings and what they do here, and if you’re working on a game – why not apply?
For those of you interested in coding or developing, you can sign up for courses with Code Coven, an award-winning classroom with a focus on gender-marginalized developers at all levels of expertise. Code Coven’s aim is to turn the tide in the gaming industry as it has long been overridden with toxicity.
While it may not be the most recognized day out there, I feel it is very important to draw attention to International Women’s Day, as there is still too much negativity felt by myself and I’m sure many of my fellow women in the field. Our own team here at Pocket Tactics is female-led, which in itself is rare in the journalism field covering video games.
There are so, so many incredible women forging their path, creating amazing games, and changing the industry for good – I welcome you to join me in celebrating them and appreciating their efforts not just today, but all the time.
If you’re in the reading mood and want some more feel-good features, I highly recommend our interview with Genshin Impact’s Christina Costello, our writer Daz’s reflection on games that give gender euphoria, and a look at how Life is Strange: True Colors continues to help us to face grief.