(from the Daily Trojan):
By Tiana Lowe
According to the Princeton Review and unanimously agreed upon by industry giants, USC has the best video game design program in the country. Women also happen to comprise nearly half of USC Games’ undergraduate student body and a majority of its graduate student body. Because neither sex nor gender identity really have any bearing on one’s ability to design a video game, these two statistics likely have no correlation to one another.
However a lack of correlation does not mean that Games’ large population of women is not a good thing. After all, the video game industry reaps incredible profits, so women en masse entering the top ranks of the industry can contribute greatly to the decrease of the gender pay gap, which economists largely attribute to a dearth of women entering profitable — often meaning STEM — fields.
So when USC secures a panel with leaders in the video game industry, such as the Head of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment and the CEO of Riot Games, it has a net positive effect for everyone involved, from the students whose work would be showcased to the women who attend a highly diverse school which is actively redefining the industry standard. Everybody wins, until the top games department in the country cancels the “Legends of the Games Industry” — that’s not me editorializing, that was the actual name of the panel — just four hours before the event… CONTINUE READING HERE