The big news in the female world of gaming last week was the cancellation of the Women in Games Conference in the UK.Immediately gamers began speculating on what could have possibly been the cause of the cancellation.The press release cites, ‘low ticket sales’ as the culprit.While several gamers balked that there was a Women’s Conference in the first place (and yes several of these were females), several female gaming media sites sat dumbfounded as to why we were never contacted, until the last minute,to even offer support for the conference.

After passing a few twits with a few other gaming femme fatales, such as Roulette ofFrag Dolls fame and the Editor in Chief over at Gamingangels.com, we began brainstorming about what we could do stop this from happening again.I then sat down and began thinking about the root of the problem.Yes, we can and most likely will do something to set the gaming world on its ear again, but we as media outlets are not the problem.We are part of the problem but there are tons of extenuating factors that will most likely go largely overlooked.One of which being the still very HUGE gulf between women developers and female gaming communities.While a lot of community managers ARE female, their bosses are not necessarily pushing them in our directions.One personal friend who is a community manager for a well known gamecompany has complained many times to me, in private, that their PR agency refuses to deal with any female oriented site, no matter how good their numbers are.That begs a whole other question about the underlying sexism the world of gaming. But I digress.When conferences such as Women in Games or the women’s portion of GDC come around, the hosts still visit other sites thinking that this will get them the exposure they need.More people will take note and want to take part in the conference.The problem with this is that a lot of women are not card carrying members of these communities.Sure they visit to read a review or two, but they aren’t there posting, reading or even noticing the advert there.Even if they were, there are no special sections dedicated to women on these sites. How does the ad receive the proper attention? Their demographic has been and always will be males, ages 18 to 34.So why are the organizers of women’s conferencing going to male sites for support?This would be the same as a minority going to the KKK for support (sorry I’m an extremist).These sites simply do not have the female gamers’ best interests at heart.I don’t believe it’s on purpose, I simply believe it’s just a lack of understanding.If you are not a woman,you simply cannot understand what being a woman is like.You can empathize and sympathize but never really understand. One of the most profound things I’ve heard said was from Trina @ gamingangels.com and that was her response to a guy who asked what he could do to help out the female gaming agenda.She looked at him and smile and said simply ‘Nothing.’She further elaborated saying what I’ve said above.If you’re not one of us,there is VERY little you can do to support us.Your fellow males are going to either rib you for helping (ie our own Master Blaster has had his manhood called into question several times for being on staff here..and worse) or you’re going to do the wrong thing eventually, once again just because you’re handling it the way a man would.This can be helpful sometimes and sometimes not.

Another theory of mine is that it comes down to simple fear.Fear of excludingor appearing to exclude men from events, etc.This fear is completely unfounded if you look at the veritable explosion of female oriented programming on TV. Female oriented events will not fail because men are not present, nor will making these events more feminine send women screaming. The Oxygen network pulls off the girlie without being girlie thing very well. They make no apologies for their programming being geared toward women and I must say I frequently watch Oxygen and LOVE their programming. There is no ‘for women’ in the title, their programming is based on a simple observe and present.They observe women and then present programming based on what they’ve studied.The same SHOULD be what’s done with conferences for women, but instead they swing from one extreme to the other.They are too speech and paper heavy instead of playing up to not only development but also the gaming side.Women gamers are obviously visual too, or they wouldn’t be gaming in the first place.It’s true that visuals are not a large part of what attracts women to games, but it is still a factor.While the guys get all the flash and dazzle (and booth babes), the women are offered days long speeches and papers.While I consider all of this interesting, several other women gamers are turned off and may just want some good swag and play some really good demos, with a feminine flair, of course.And just maybe after reading about the speakers, they may want to sit in on other conferences and (gasp) listen.

One poster, who was a girl gamer, said something on joystiq.com that at first infuriated me, but later after I thought about, made perfect sense.She said that conferences like these didn’t offer her anything of interest, why did they bother even having them.Yes the women speaking are brilliant, but because a lot of women devs are so far removed from the communities, a lot of up and coming next gen gamers have NO idea who they are, what they’ve done and aren’t impressed when they are headlining a conference.What’s worse is, when these events go to the ‘male’ sites to be promoted, they leave female gaming sites like this one, completely powerless…even to offer support.How exactly do we fix this?Stay tuned….

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