Laila Shabir's Kickstarted game is nearly 10 months overdue. But it's not because she mishandled the budget. No one left the project. In fact, everything had been going extremely well until April.
That's when she got distracted.
Quite unexpectedly, Shabir realized that helping young girls learn to make their own games was more important. So she put her own company's game aside in order to help Girls Make Games become a reality.
Learn District is Shabir's indie educational game studio. Its game, Penguemic, is a quirky vocabulary-builder that raised just over $50,000. It was on its way to a scheduled June release when, around April of this year, Shabir wanted to hire a developer to begin working on the team's next title.
"I really wanted it to be a girl," Shabir says, "because currently the industry is something like 80/20 [men to women]. We spent months trying to find that person and it was impossible."
The problem was that all of the qualified women in Silicon Valley, near where Learn District is headquartered, were being pulled into the larger technology firms like Google and Microsoft. The local talent pool was only so deep.
"These big companies are taking resources away from me," Shabir says, "an indie game developer. So, how do I get girls interested in making games? I know girls like playing games. Maybe a summer camp would do it."
She idly tweeted out the idea, and it caught fire. Before long Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine, was championing the idea.
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That's when Girls Make Games, a girls-only game development summer camp, was born.
"It was supposed to be a small workshop in our backyard," Shabir says. "It turned into 14 international locations in just a few months."
The inaugural camp was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California in June, with follow-up camps hot on its heels. The next session is in Los Angeles. Then San Diego, Austin, Boston, Denver, Washington D.C. and Seattle. Later London, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Melbourne and Dubai. Shabir will be attending most of them herself, trying to crystalize the ethos of each session.
"Our mission is to reach a million girls by 2020," says Shabir, a number she can't quite seem to believe is within reach. But girls the world over are clamoring for the camp.
As Shabir describes it, GMG sounds intense. Just about the only easy day is the first one, where campers are given the opportunity to play a wide range of indie games, from Towerfall to Fez.
The goal is to develop a "flavor profile" of everyone in the camp, and use that profile to organize the girls into teams. After that, the groups of five to six girls aged 10 and 16 have less than three weeks to brainstorm a game, write a design document, learn to program, solicit freelance music and art, polish and then test their creation. And then they have to sell their idea to a panel of experts.
In the end, Learn District puts up a Kickstarter for the winning game and, if it's successful, they help the team make it.
The first game, a title called The Hole Story, had already made its $10,000 goal and has around 2 weeks left to raise even more money.
Part of the first camp's success has been a high student-to-teacher ratio. The Mountain View camp had 10 instructors to 35 students, a ratio that's roughly 10 times higher than the average American middle school classroom. And camp isn't cheap; a full three-week course costs $1,200.
Making sure that girls from different socioeconomic backgrounds have the chance to attend is part of GMG's mission.
"About 75 percent of our students, even in the Bay Area camp, were on some form of a scholarship," Shabir says. "We followed the same model for all of our camps."
The only limitation on the growth of GMG, Shabir says, is the growth of Learn District. That's why she's considering spinning the camps off to be its own entity with its own management structure.
"I need to put the organization together," Shabir says with a sigh. "Learn District is stretched thin. So my first goal after the summer camps is to put a structure together where we're probably going to go the non-profit route and partner up with some great companies who have been connecting with us. We've heard from Ubisoft. We heard from Rovio. We heard from Blizzard. All these big gaming companies want to promote this. I think having those strategic partners and then also educators, including big charter schools or big school districts in different cities, would allow us to get to [low income] neighborhoods as well."
But Shabir is moving as quickly as she can to fill the need she's uncovered to get girls up to speed on programming and game design.
Tomorrow we'll meet one of the members of the Negatives, the team of young women behind GMG's first successful Kickstarter, and the very next game to be brought to life by the experienced team of indie developers at Learn District.
Comments
So instead of No Girls Allowed it’s become No Boys Allowed? Why is this any better? Why not make it co-ed?
By Drew Hurdle on 07.29.14 12:38pm
In the mindset of approaching this with equality I agree. However she wanted to create this camp to be an equalizer and balance the ratio.
That said, I think with a very strong staff, you can achieve far more with co-ed. Teaching a young male with first hand experience and counsel that a female can contribute just as much value as anyone else is possibly more effective than segregated efforts.
By asianwaste on 07.29.14 12:44pm
As one of the girl designers for The Hole Story, and knowing Laila personally, I can confidently say that all she wants is to balance the ratio, not segregate genders or not allow boys. All we want is for girls and boys to have a more equal number of each gender participating in and creating games.
By Averyj on 07.31.14 3:19pm
I think it was created with the intention of trying to draw more girls and women into the game industry. They made the camp for girls which shows they are wanted and welcome. Just like if you make a camp or club for single dad’s, it’s a way to give support in a community or industry that they are a minority in.
And there are already tons of co-op schools and camps out there that are also successful but if this is getting more girls and women interested then it is a very good thing.
By TrinPie on 07.29.14 12:53pm
I think the reason why most people react negatively to this sort of thing is you NEVER hear about any other camps.
I’ve been a pretty heavy gaming enthusiast for 30 years and I never knew this was even a thing until I saw these girls only camps.
From that perspective it can seem as if it’s unfair and if these articles are your only exposure it can seem as if boys are being excluded. I still honestly don’t know what extent these camps are available to boys or girls so it’s hard for me to judge.
By mrthewhite on 07.29.14 5:04pm
Girls and women face unique challenges in the industry, both as consumers and as developers, and they should be able to have places where they can pursue these interests without dealing with those barriers.
Boys and men do not have to deal with gender barriers in this industry. I think it would be great for similar camps to exists that boys can attend, but the reality is that almost every tech-focused kids program out there is going to overwhelmingly consist of boys. It’s not hard to find places where boys feel welcome and encouraged to pursue science, math and technology.
By anabbeynormality on 07.30.14 7:14pm
It’s so exciting that the camps took off! Splitting them off into a separate legal entity is probably necessary, but this is such a great example of how startups evolve as they grow. Congrats, Laila!
By TrinketTom on 07.29.14 12:39pm
For those that have an opposition to a girl-only game development camp, you forget that the industry is currently a male-dominant career path. Yes, having a largely one-sided gender work space can be intimidating for the minority gender. With the existence of this game development camp to service the minority gender, girls will be introduced to what can be a potentially new-found love for game development as well as promote confidence within to battle any disillusionment that may have been a direct result of this disproportionate gender divide. This is a great initiative and I support it 100%.
By impatientInpatient on 07.29.14 12:46pm
The greater problem is the societal pressures one. Not from males on females, but rather females on females.
It is not seen as the “done thing” for girls to be interested in games, or to want to be involved in their creation. Not just by sexist manchildren, but by a large amount of girls and women themselves. This can put girls off from putting themselves in the position to learn and explore the industry while boys have much less of a problem.
It’s easier for those girls to see an all-girls setting and see that there are other like-minded girls interested in making games and to put themselves out there to give it a go.
The industry is overwhelmingly male dominated because most girls are never given the chance through one reason or another to find out if it’s a career path they’d be interested in. We need projects like this to allow them that opportunity and for them to feel safe enough to take it.
These events don’t take away from other opportunities for both genders to find a way into learning the skills and interests necessary for the industry, they just add to the opportunities for girls to be able to.
By Cdesigns on 07.29.14 1:25pm
Promoting equality with segregation seems like a fine tactic.
By Lordovos on 07.29.14 3:35pm
“Boys Make Games” summarizes the current state of our industry quite well already. I think this is an awesome initiative and I’m pretty sure you could start your own Co-ed Game Camp if you’d like to as well and I’d wager Laila and company be supportive of that too.
By Megadestructo on 07.29.14 5:08pm
See ? This, THIS, I stand 100% behind. You go girls !
Be the change you want to see.
By Lanarchy on 07.29.14 6:24pm
MmmMmm….Gender segregation. A fine path to making the industry more equal! /s
By Captain Sisay on 07.30.14 9:29am
I’m all for the feminist movement, but finish your promised product first.
By GeoffMan on 07.29.14 6:47pm
Is that a left handed gameboy?
By Sean Parker on 07.29.14 8:12pm
Pink Beemo
By Ofx360 on 07.29.14 8:13pm
Seriously rolling my eyes at some of these comments…
Yeah, in a perfect world, Shabir’s game would have been on time, and then the camps would have happened. But sometimes you have to strike while the iron is hot. There was no guarantee that the window of opportunity to get support from established developers in founding these camps was going to stay open in time for development to wrap up. If it means that the future of game development is made that much brighter by getting these kids excited to create, then what’s one delayed game? Is your ass really that chapped about it? Looks like sour grapes to me.
And the sneering opposition to a girls-only camp really just misses the whole point. A boy’s club mentality, once established, is incredibly difficult to overturn, so creating a safe space for girls in order to give them the skills and confidence to compete in a field that’s going to demand more of them than their male peers is the sensible solution. When things are eventually (hopefully) more evenly distributed, co-ed camps will be a fine thing, as well.
Congrats to Shabir, and hooray for Girls Make Games!
By Dianasaur on 07.31.14 1:47am