Graduates News

30 Jun 09

Interview with AIE graduate, Wendy Langer

 

Name:	Wendy Langer
Job Title:	Programmer
Employer:	Tantalus Media
Qualifications:	Bachelor Degree in Physics - Melbourne University Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development (Programming) – AIE

Tell me about your current job, including position title, company when you first started and what your role involves...
I'm currently working as a programmer at Tantalus Media in South Melbourne. I first started there as a part-time intern mid last year, while I was still studying at the AIE. My role involves working on various aspects of the code behind a motocross/off-road racing game we are developing for the PSP.

What are your qualification(s)?
I have a degree in Physics from Melbourne University, and an Advanced Diploma in Games Development (programming stream) from the AIE.

I didn't study computer science at uni during my first degree (the physics degree), but we did have a one semester unit called 'computational physics' where we learnt to solve some interesting physics problems using FORTRAN, and I had also taught myself BASIC when I was teenager.

Why did you decide on a career in the games industry?
I actually first tried making a computer game when I was only eleven or twelve years old! It was a text-based 'Adventure Game', similar to the game Colossal Caves, which I loved playing at the time (this was during the eighties, mind you ;) The game was written in Basic on a Microbee computer. Unfortunately the project got somewhat stalled during early production due to ...well.... factors! So it was never actually brought to market. I can proudly say however that it did feature at least twelve rooms and a dragon :)

After this I drifted away from the games industry for quite some time, and physics and mathematics have became my main interests. After studying these topics at uni, I drifted into web devleopment and learnt some more programming. I do recall that at one point I had a kind of sudden realisation that video games didn't just appear fully-fledged from nowhere - they must be made by someone. And if they were being made somewhere, maybe they were being made right here in Australia :) So I looked into it and discovered that we have quite a healthy Video Games industry right here in Australia.

Eventually I realised that Games Programming was one area of programming where you actually get to use some physics as well as programming, and also 3D math for the graphics, and then I became really interested and started looking into courses and so on.

How did AIE assist you in getting your games career started?
At the AIE I learnt the tools of the trade. In this case, this means basics of the C++ language, which is the most frequently used programming language in games programming. C++ is a general purpose language and is used in many areas of programming, not just games, but it was not a language I had used previously, so I wanted to get up and running with the language before applying for jobs.

Even more importantly, we learnt a lot about issues and techniques which are specific to programming for games. This included things to do with graphics, real-time programming/ timing / game loops, 3d modelling, physics engines, memory usage, and much more.

This was all put in context by having us actually make a game during the second half of the year. We worked as a team along with the artists, and followed through all the main stages that a 'real' game would go through - the initial pitch, pre-production, various different production milestones and so on.

The outcome of this was not just a lot of very useful programming practice, but also an invaluable experience of how the entire process fits together.

Finally, we learnt a quite a bit about the local Games Industry - we had speakers from local companies coming in regularly to speak to us, and our teachers all had industry experience.

Do you think games companies are encouraging more women into your field? How could this be improved?
Well, I certainly don't think they are *discouraging* women. I think that the low proportion of women is this industry is largely a roll-on effect of the low proportion of women in technical fields generally, and is not specific to the games industry. It is true that there are actually somewhat fewer women here than even in the other traditionally male-dominated areas I have experienced (physics at university, general IT and web-development in the workplace, and also the open source community).

However although there are perhaps a few less women here than even in other areas of IT and science, the difference is not huge - we are talking about the difference between, say, 20 percent women in IT generally [1], as opposed to maybe 10 percent in games programming specifically.

What we really need to ask is why women make up only 20 percent of IT proffessionals generally.

In terms now of what games companies can actually do to improve things, I think that, as a base-line, they generally need to keep their HR policies as up to date as possible, in terms of things like maternity leave and so on; but I don't think that this necessarily needs any more work than what is required in other high-skill professions.

Since I don't think that the issue of the small proportion of women in the video games industry can really be separated from the larger question of women in IT generally, I'll now turn to a couple of possibilities related to this.

I think that perhaps the best that games companies can do is to work with IT generally on the issue of getting more women taking up IT educational qualifications. Unfortunately this is not something most games companies are in a position to directly address. I think perhaps the simplest thing is raising awareness of the industry at high-school level, and making sure that it is shown as the dynamic and interesting field to work I that it really is, rather than some 'boys-only' ghetto!

Making women working in the field visible to high-school girls is important I think, as it is around that age when people are starting to take decisions which will affect what they can study later – uni is already a bit late for this.

How do you find working in an industry where most of your colleagues are men? Are there any pressures to be 'one of the boys'?
Hmmmm.... I think I might divide that into (at least) two questions. Firstly, I very much enjoy having lots of male colleagues, although I would very much like to see more women as well. My ideal would be pretty close to 50-50, I would say, however I basically like to work with other people who share my interests, regardless of gender.

Secondly, I actually totally enjoy being 'one of the boys', and have been known at times to have an completely appalling sense of humour which makes grown men blanch. So, I can't say whether there is any pressure to be 'one of the boys', since it's not something I'm particularly trying to avoid anyway :)

I imagine that the question has more to with whether I feel I have to act in ways that I don't really enjoy or try to change myself to fit in. In this case the answer is definitely 'no', it's more the case that I have to change how I act when I am around 'non geeks' ;)

In thinking about this question, I realised that we need to be careful not to stereotype the men in this industry! I personally have worked with very a wide range of very different men in science, in IT generally, and in the Games Industry specifically.

This ranges from those whom, when in group form, you could fairly comfortably and accurately describe as 'the lads' (in the nicest possible way ! ), to those who wouldn't fit this description at all, and of course everything in between.

I've met plenty of extremely empathic, very lovely, mature, articulate, erudite, caring and warm male science /computer types (it's true!). Many if not most of these men could easily have done very well in totally different career paths, non technical ones which involve lots of people-skills and what-have-you. So the fact that someone happens to also have an interest in computers shouldn't make you think that they have no social prowess!

What do you think women can bring to the games industry?
Well, as you may have noticed by now, I'm very wary of the old hack that women have more 'people oriented' skills and all that jazz. I would say that the biggest thing that women can bring to the games industry, and to any technical industry, is access to an enormous well-spring of currently untapped technical talent.

Given the idea that, as a society, we want to try and employ the truly best person for the job in a particular position, then unless it is really true that women have less aptitude for this kind of work, then the fact is that at the moment we are not getting to select from the 'best of the best' as workers in IT. Currently, we are getting the best out of an available fifty percent of possible workers. I should probably note here that I don't believe that this is not largely due to hiring practices - there simply aren't all that many female applicants.

It's probably clear from the above that I don't think that the small number of women in IT, and in technical fields generally, has all that much to do with differences in technical aptitude between women and men, and nor does it have much to do with any *innate* differences in interest-levels for technical subjects. There may well be some differences in interest levels, but I believe these to be largely culturally generated and not an intrinsic part of being male or female.

Finally, as mentioned I also don't think that it has much to do with current hiring practices or sexist cultures within the workplace. I'm not saying that these are never problems, but I'm saying that they do not explain the magnitude of the difference.

The root cause is, in my view, that so few many women are taking IT qualifications at university.

Unfortunately I don't quite know what the underlyingcause of that is , except that I'm pretty sure that it has a lot to do with social expectations and not much to do with aptitude or intrinsic interest.

The end result though, is that there are very few women applying for these jobs, which makes it difficult to build up a critical mass of visible women working in the area, which in turn reinforces the image that it is an area only for boys, and so on ad infinitem.

I think that we probably need to re-evaluate a number of stereotypes about the IT industry. It seems to me that we have two sets of hackneyed ideas which should be questioned more often.

The first is the idea that male = technical, competitive, goal-oriented, and so on, whilst female = touchey-feely, team-oriented, people-skilled, etc etc .

The second is actually the model of which particular skill-sets are required for a certain job. I'll only give one example here, (since this interview has already become very long!), but take the fact that programming is often seen a s solitary activity, carried out by lonesome geeks in a bedroom or closed office somewhere. Contrast this with the reality in the workplace, which is that programming can often be an extremely social process, with requirements for high-levels of inter-personal skills, a focus on team-work, and a general enjoyment of being around other geeks.

The exact definition of 'social skills' may vary a little from other industiries (dress code may vary, exact forms of social interaction may change, and so on), but that doesn't mean that the skills are not important or that they aren't there – they are just expressed in a unique way.

So, the people we want in IT are those who have the technical aptitude for (and interest in) solving hard problems, but also the people skills to work well in a team. The exact mix of these skills will vary from job to job and at different points in time at the same job, but both skill-sets are important.

Erm.... what was the question again ?!?!?!?????

Would you encourage other women to enter the games industry and why?
Yes, definitely! It's a very rewarding area to work in, and it's an industry sector which is growing rapidly at the moment. You get to use a range of skills, and to work with interesting people on interesting problems, as well as to have some fun along the way :)

Would you recommend AIE to people interested in entering the games industry?
Yes I would - its a good way to get into this industry. If you have prior programming experience (either from a university degree or from working as a programmer in some capacity) you may be able to enter straight into the second year of the course. This is a great option if you have already been working for a few years and want to change industries. On the other hand, if you are coming into it straight from high-school, and you already know you want to work in this particular industry, you can do both years of the course and get the background ...

From your perspective, how do you see the GFC impacting on your industry?
The GFC has definitely had an impact on the games industry, but I wouldn't say it was any worse off than any other industry. In some ways the games industry is reasonably robust to these kinds of economic down turns, since people still spend money on relatively value-for-money entertainment like games and videos when they are no longer spending on things like holidays and other more expensive items.

Personal terms, since the down-turn, I am now less sure of keeping my job once the current project I'm on is over, but I am still confident that in the long term I'll be able to find more work in the industry.

Feel free to ramble here.....
Uhm, I think I already rambled a fair bit above, so here I'm just putting my footnotes and related-reading links!

Numbered Footnotes referred to above
[1] http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3435251

Other Interesting Links:
Maria Kluwe: A Fifty Year Wave of Change:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/womenintech/2007/09/05/a-fifty-year-wave-of-change.html

A discussion of women's involvement in the very early days of computing (1930s, 40s, and 50s):
http://www.makeworlds.org/node/146

Article discussing lack of women in computer science generally:
http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2008/023.html

Short article summarising some results from the 'Diversiti Hiring Influence Report' of 2006:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/38607,diversiti-where-are-the-women-in-it.aspx

Really interesting article about influence of pair-programming in computer science education:
http://www.ncwit.org/images/practicefiles/PairProgramming_RetainingWomenCollaborativeLearning_Practice.pdf

Another pair-programming one:
http://www.computer.org