Zoe Quinn jokes that a lifelong devotion to video games ruined her eyesight. As a child, she would hide under her covers at night, shining a small flashlight on the pixelated characters on the tiny, green screen of her Nintendo GameBoy. As she grew up, she became as interested in building the games as she was playing them.
 
"I'm a mechanic's daughter," Quinn says, "I grew up taking things apart to find out how they work." But she went into art instead of computer science. "The percentage of women hired into the industry is like margin-of-error small," Quinn says. It's not necessarily out of sexism, she suspects, but simply because so few women apply in the first place. It becomes, she says, "a chicken-or-the-egg problem."
 
While women make up slightly more than half of university graduates in Canada, only 17 per cent of them are in engineering and of those female engineers, only 9.6 per cent are in software development. Meanwhile, there are 96 companies in Ontario alone employing about 2,600 people, with an expected growth rate of 21 per cent, each trying to develop a hit as video games revenues begin to outpace film and TV sales. Within a single day of its November 2011 release, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 earned more than $400 million worldwide. Odds are, however, that very few if any women shared in that success.
 
"It's an incredibly inspiring and frustrating industry," says Lesley Phord-Toy, a producer at Ubisoft and current head of the Toronto chapter of the International Games Developer Association. She understands Quinn's dissatisfaction with the male-dominated field, laughing at how, "my manager Jade Raymond did a talk last year where she compared herself to a unicorn."
 
That's changing, says Phord-Toy, pointing to multiple initiatives aimed at getting more women into the gaming community and, eventually, into hiring and managing roles. "It's really important," she says, not only for women but the industry as a whole, "It gets people thinking and talking about games in a different way." Newly founded networking groups and "DIY apprenticeships" not only nurture female game creators, they encourage news ways of thinking about what makes a great game.

These efforts were largely pioneered by Toronto game designer Mare Sheppard after she bristled at the "somebody's girlfriend" problem. Co-founder of Metanet Software with her business partner Raigan Burns (their award-winning game N is now available for free on their website), Sheppard has been in the business for more than a decade. A few years ago, when the duo attended a games development conference, people talked to Burns (a guy) as if Sheppard wasn't there.
 
"They just assume the woman at one of these events isn't a game developer in her own right but just there as somebody's girlfriend," Sheppard says. "We don't feel like we fit with the stereotype, which is: male, overweight, nerdy, Star Trek fan, lives in parents' basement. It's a stereotype I'm sure tons of men find unpalatable as well…. We need to get reality to catch up."
 
As a member of the Hand Eye Society, a Toronto video-game community coalition, Sheppard became a programming partner with TIFF Nexus, an Ontario Media Development Corporation-sponsored initiative to link the province's film, game, digital and new media communities together in new projects. Increasing the number and role of women in the video game industry became the focus of two Hand Eye Society projects: the Difference Engine Initiative (DEI) and GameChangers.
 
Quinn was thrilled to hear about DEI, a "game incubator" for female game makers that would take them from idea to playable game in six weeks.
 
"I went to the info meeting and it was packed with interested women," she recalls. "It was a solid deadline, you had to have something done, and they were really good about bringing in mentors. Mare Sheppard was a stellar facilitator." Most of all, says Quinn, it was a welcome into a collaborative community she hadn't found when she lived in New York. Sheppard agrees that Toronto has managed to build an exceptional game-making culture.
 
"What's special about Toronto," says Sheppard, "is that we have a real sense of support and community underlying the industry... We genuinely care about each other and get enthusiastic about each other's projects. I don't know why there's this massive amount of talent here, but it works."
 
For GameChangers, the Hand Eye Society's second initiative, Sheppard teamed with Jessica Hazen of the Centre for Social Innovation to start gathering that Toronto talent and supporting women in leadership roles. Where the DEI focused on a finished game, GameChangers showcases team-building and collaboration. Though registration was not limited to women, the organizers aimed to ensure a roughly 50/50 gender split and ensured women had roles as team leaders. Sheppard was one of a trio of panelists who judged the teams' brainstormed game ideas "Dragon's Den style." One participant in her 50s presented an idea for a game involving a "bionic grandma" that would pass down kitchen skills to younger generations. Like her fellow judges, Sheppard had trouble envisioning how such a game would actually function but she loved the idea and the enthusiasm.
 
"I get asked all the time, 'What kind of games do women like?' but that's impossible to answer," Sheppard says. A poll by the Entertainment Software Association of Canada found that 38 per cent of video-game-playing Canadians are women and there's a popular notion that those numbers would be higher if the games weren't so clearly aimed at men. "Plenty of women play Halo," scoffs Sheppard, "I'm a Bioshock fan myself."
 
Within the male-dominated realm of multi-player online games, Quinn says she's encountered less sexism while playing macho kill-'em-all games like Left 4 Dead than fantasy games like World of Warcraft, which relies less on gun play than on supposedly feminine skills like cooperation and communication. "It starts with 'You're pretty good, for a girl' and gets worse," she says, "There were a lot of times I just pretended to be an adolescent boy."
 
Now, after Sheppard's mentorship, Quinn is continuing that work with Dames Making Games, a monthly social night she hosts where ladies with laptops trade ideas, build community and, of course, play amazing video games. Guys are welcome to come to her space provided by Bento Miso, a collaborative workspace on Queen West, but only if accompanying a female friend. As with previous initiatives, diversity is the watchword while keeping the focus squarely on women.
 
"The Difference Engine Initiative was extremely effective and results-based," says Quinn, "but the informality of the pub night lets people just come and hang out, to have a beer with like-minded women." Sheppard praises Quinn's offshoot as just the thing, she says, "to develop that community and develop that base of support."
 
"Being able to openly be who you are and share what you know is really key," says Quinn, who's now working to create templates for other women who want to start their own groups. "It's an open-source attitude," she says, building from the work of Sheppard, who's preparing for the next installment of GameChangers in April. As more and more women find their voice in the video-game field, Sheppard says, it will improve the entire industry.
 
"Diverse teams come up with more creative ideas," she says, "and the quality of debate is higher because you get intellectual conflict between people who are different." The Call of Duty series may be a hit but attempts to clone its success haven't worked out. They need women, Quinn says, "Real diversity will make better games, happier teams and more money. Everybody brings something different."