I’m doing some new things at work, and I’m quite pleased that my role is becoming more creative and more essential. I’ve been at Youth Digital a little over a year now, making this the most successful 8-week contract I’ve ever taken.
My new role is closer to the company’s main goal of educating all the babynerds in the whole world in caring and innovative ways (I think others might employ slightly different phrasing for this), and will end up being closer to one of my long-term goals of supporting and encouraging female developers. These female developers are around 10 years old, which isn’t quite where I thought this goal would take me, but I’ve already made the women-in-games presentation at conferences and already written editorials, and that didn’t change the industry. Maybe all we can really do is create a new generation of game developers, where doing terrible things to female developers seems like a bizarre historical footnote.
But right now, there’s that learning curve where I realize it’s taking just as long for someone to explain to me what needs to be done, and set me up to do it, and answer my questions, and then look over what I’ve done, than it would take to just do it properly.
The other day, I submitted some stuff to a colleague for the almost inevitable discovery that I’ve done things that way, when actually everyone else does it this way. Ugh.
“I noticed your titles.” My colleague said, “Very clever.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve actually had some practice naming game reviews.”
(With apologies to my editors who’ve tried to coax clever titles out of me, or at least tried to improve on my usual Stuff I Noticed While Playing This Game or Some Reasons I Didn’t Particularly Care For This Game. )
