Hi there!

I know I’ve been absolutely lazy regarding posts here, but at least I have a good reason: I traveled last Saturday to Belo Horizonte, because from Monday till Wednesday the Brazilian Symposium on Digital Games and Entertainment 2008 (or something like that – the event is better known as SBGames) took place there. The event itself was great – good papers were presented, and to my surprise the ones I liked the most were those of the Culture & Games track. As those who read my blog might have noticed, I’m quite the technical person who would rather see paper presentations about novel algorithm usages and stuff like that. But this time was different: I was quite inspired by the work of a psychologist (I got her contact, but unfortunately can’t remember her name right now) that teaches at PUC-SP, and presented a research about the somewhat complicated relation between women and games. I’d certainly have a lot to write here about what I think is really the reason why many girls steer clear from games – and why this is very much linked to they staying away from IT careers in general. But I’ll do it in a future post

Apart from that, I managed to make some new contacts and see again people I hadn’t seen since the last SBGames – like the boy who works for Southlogic, and Mike Foster and Bruno Matzdorf from SCEA. These 2 guys from SCEA are very, very cool and I hope they succeed in bringing Sony’s academic initiative to Brazil, as well as incubate more companies here. I’ll try again to make someone at Unicamp interested in their very low-price offer of development kits for PS2 and PSP, so students can learn how to program using videogame consoles. However, this time I won’t try only the Institute of Computing – I know everything there goes too damn slowly – but also FEEC. Let’s see how this attempt goes then.

Finally, I had the “opportunity” to hear Bertrand Chaverot’s keynote on November the 11th. For those who don’t know, he is the responsible for bringing an Ubisoft development studio to Brazil, in order to develop games for Nintendo DS aimed at girls aged 7-14. And really, I’m grateful for his initiative. But…he made a sick joke during his keynote. It just screwed up my vision of Ubisoft São Paulo, even though I, like many people, till that moment would have very much liked to work there. For someone who was trying to make people believe the Imagine series games are not just a bunch of stereotypes for girls, but have a solid basis on market analysis and all, he really…just gave the wrong message. After saying that the games industry needs more “women who are designers and artists, so they can make better games for women”, he said something on the lines of “but not programmers, because as you know, women’s brains are not good at that”. Then he laughed, and the audience, composed in majority of post-pubescent (or otherwise apparently immature) men laughed too. Come on…something like this can’t be said, SPECIALLY NOT at a formal event in which you are representing not yourself and your 19th century opinions on women, but YOUR COMPANY. By the way, I really pitied the guys there, because as Chaverot himself had asked and the audience promptly had responded before his ridiculous commentary, most of them knew neither how to program nor how to draw games. But still they laughed, even obviously having no experience whatsoever with the very type of person they were laughing about: women who are programmers.

So…what can I say of a man who says a thing like that to his audience? Can I really believe that Ubisoft’s “games for girls” aren’t stereotyped? And finally, what does Chaverot think of one of the greatest symbols of Ubisoft nowadays, Jade Raymond? For those who don’t know, she was an excellent programmer at SCEA and is now a producer at Ubisoft Montreal, having worked as the main producer of nothing less than Assassin’s Creed. There are many, many others like her, who are completely forgotten by stupid men like those on that audience, who just can’t seem to grow up and realize men aren’t the center of this world. Truly talented and strong-willed people who have and execute ideas are.

That’s it. Jokes definitely can give people bad impressions of the joker. And the game industry as a whole only loses when its important professionals have attitudes like his and CliffyB’s.