XYZ: ALTERNATIVE VOICES IN GAME DESIGN
July 14 - September 2, 2013
For most of its 40+ year history, the video game industry has been viewed as a boys’ club (and rightly so). When MODA presented XYZ: Alternative Voices in Game Design, the industry was estimated to be only between 10% and 15% female. Less than half of that percentage had a direct impact on game design itself. But despite these numbers, women have held significant (and highly influential) roles in the creative process of many games.
XYZ looked at the first forty years of video games and the diversity of play experiences women had a hand in developing. The breadth of games represented in this exhibition was a testament to the ways in which women have stretched, bent, and broken the traditional conventions of what games can be.
This exhibition ran the gamut from commercially-successful blockbusters like Centipede, Skylanders, League of Legends, and LittleBigPlanet to educational games like Whyville and Escape From Woomera. But XYZ also went behind the screen, looking at the immersive experiences of Uncle Roy All Around You and Why So Serious?, in addition to RE:Activism and Career Moves. Games seeking new audiences were included, too: Chop Suey, The Night Journey, and Analogue: A Hate Story.
The public perception of game developers has been that of a group of twenty-something men creating games for themselves. This narrative was challenged by XYZ, which focused instead on the diversity of vision offered by women game developers in addition to acknowledging their important influence on both the history and future of game design.
Curated by Celia Pearce, Cindy Poremba, Adam Rafinski, John Sharp, and Akira Thompson
