Video game industry still unfair to women who code: Phoenix Perry

Phoenix Perry, founder of the Code Liberation Foundation, which is holding a Game Maker workshop tonight, gave an interview for VGRevolution, in which she makes it clear that, from her perspective, the game industry is still unfair to women who code.

Some takeaways from the conversation with the Bed-Stuy developer:

• Perry said, “GenX didn’t invent the internet but we did monetize it as a space we could survive in versus minimum wage café jobs for better or for worse.”
• She highlights technology from Little Bits, Adafruit and Scratch as potential difference makers in appealing to young girls and helping them get bought in strongly enough to STEM work that they’ll fight for a better place at the table.
• She describes the indie gaming scene here as tight knit and underground, largely ascribing that to a lack of investment money here to make it more mainstream. Ben Johnson described it much the same way. Perry said, “I think our indie scene is full of women, queer folk, people of color and punks who were generally not happy with the state of things in games or who are completely disconnected from triple A games.”
• She’s looking forward to working with forthcoming technology such as The new Kinect, the Emotiv and the Rift.
• The organization she founded for women to teach women gaming code, Code Liberation sees mostly women in their 20s and 30s, but they’ve had students from 14 to their 60s.
• The other programmers she works with are looking into some sort of women run game development company. Details are few, because she says it’s too early and can’t say more.

If you want to see what Phoenix Perry can make, keep watching for the release of her new game, Crystallon.