Raising awareness: Women in Computing & Computer Game History (for Women's History Month) [GA inside

Post to raise awareness about Women in Computing & Computer Games History (for Women's History Month)

Hi all,

This month, March, is Women's History Month in the United States. I've compiled a list of some great women whose contributions to Computing & Computer Games have allowed us to have so many nice computer games we're enjoying. Please take a moment to glance through and understand the role women have played in computing and computer games. At the end of this post is a small giveaway for you. :)

• Ada Lovelace: Around the 1800's, she theorized that in the future, people would be able to instruct automatons and machines using programs to accomplish feats other than pure calculations. She was a mathemetician and the very first computer programmer, who wrote programs for Babbage's Analytical Engine.

• The ENIAC Women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. These women were programmers for the ENIAC, yet were historically recognized for over 50 years as merely "Refrigerator Ladies" -- i.e. models posing in front of the machine. Their programming skills helped the Allies win WW2: they programmed the ENIAC to calculate artillery firing tables at 2400 times the speed that a human could, allowing for thousands of calculations -- they also programmed the ENIAC to help analyze the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.

• Grace Hopper: You can thank Grace Hopper for having so many programming languages that now read like English -- Java, Python, etc. In a time when computers were programmed with 0's and 1's, she strongly believed that programming languages could be created that would allow humans to program computers in a language closer to human speech than to the 0's and 1's of machine language. She designed a programming language demonstrating the feasibility of such a concept, which later became the foundation for the COBOL programming language. It's doubtful there would be nearly as many Indie games available if people had to learn machine language in order to program a new game!

• Hedy Lamarr If you've ever downloaded and played mobile games wirelessly on your phone, you owe it to Hedy Lamarr. She invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS), which subsequently allowed Wi-Fi technology to be developed.

• Carol Shaw: one of the first video game designers, and developer of River Raid, a game that won numerous video game awards, among many others. She had found a work-around for Atari's extremely limited computer memory by making use of an algorithm to procedurally generate terrain (which would create the exact same map each time it ran) rather than storing the entire map physically; conversely, Carol seeded enemy AI with a random number generator to make enemy movements less predictable. For the record, River Raid (a vertically scrolling shooter) was banned in Germany for being "harmful" for minors to play.

• Roberta Williams: Creator of the graphic adventure game, where previously everything had just been text adventures. For those of you who love graphical adventure games like King's Quest, Quest for Glory, and countless others -- you have Roberta Williams to thank!

• Jane Jensen: Who worked with Roberta Williams and eventually branched off to push graphical adventures into an entirely different direction, that of horror & gothic, by developing the Gabriel Knight series of adventures.

• Amy Hennig: Amy Hennig took the gothic horror theme one step further after Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight series -- pushing it into the realm of action / fighting / platformer, and eventually into 3D, with the creation of the iconic Legacy of Kain series.

• Corinne Yu: After working on Roberta Williams' King's Quest series, Corinne Yu went on to write the game engine for Spec Ops, the code base for the Quake 2 game engine, and later used her game engine design experience to help create the Borderlands series. At the age of 28, she became Director of Technology at Ion Storm. She received the international Best in Engineering Award at GDC (Game Developers Conference).

• Kim Swift: She designed an entirely new kind of puzzle-platform game where players shoot spatially-linked "portals" to help navigate platform-puzzles. The final game she created was called Portal. Portal included previously unknown elements that mysteriously caused people to find it more emotional to incinerate a Weighted Companion Cube (an object in Portal that neither talks nor acts) over harming a talking & acting NPC in another game (even though a major component of that other game was whether or not to harm the NPC).

Want to support women in technology? Want to see more women get into programming? (Who knows, maybe a woman will have a completely new idea for a computer game that will blow your mind!) Consider giving a kind word or two for a girl who is struggling with writing a program -- that's all it takes to help set that child on a path towards incorporating programming into daily life! You can also donate to the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology if you wish. Even without donating, just bumping this article will help raise awareness about women and their role in allowing us to enjoy such a great variety of computer games.

And, as promised, a special giveaway just for reading this:

Enjoy!