Pushkin. This is solvable. I'm Ronald Young Junior. I wasn't thinking about starting a women's organization or a summer camp company. I just wanted to make games. About two point eight billion people play video games worldwide, from Fortnite to Rocket League, my personal favorite. Gaming is a popular form of entertainment, relaxation, and a way to connect with friends and sometimes strangers. When I started Girls Make Games, I really wasn't very familiar with gaming, and I did grow up playing on my Atari and some arcade games like street Fighter or Teken, but that was the extent of it. That's Layla Shaber. She's the co founder and CEO of Girls Make Games, an organization that aims to introduce game design to young girls. Many people, including me my, spend a lot of time gaming, but rarely take the time to think about who's making these games and what goes into development. And that means you know, programming your game, designing your character, making art for it, animating it, adding sound effects, sometimes even creating and recording those sound effects from everyday objects that are around you, testing it, and finally implementing and sharing it with people so they can play your game. She founded a game studio with her husband, but when it came to hiring, she realized just how underrepresented women are in the gaming industry. She launched an annual summer camp to solve that problem. And it was just very shocking to me because I'd come from banking and research in all these other places where we had a lot more diversity, you know, even though it was male dominated. It was something like maybe fifty five forty five or sixty forty, but not like eighty twenty, which is what gaming is. Layla's husband was a professional gamer himself, and he introduced her to the kinds of opportunities the world of gaming provides. He didn't talk to me about how cool gaming is. He talked to me about how powerful and how influential gaming is. Because nine out of ten kids play games in the US. That's a lot of kids. That's a lot of young people being shaped by one medium. Nearly fifty percent of people who play video games identify as female, but less than thirty percent of game developers or women. This is a problem that we can solve. I was working in research and kind of on my way to getting a PhD eventually and becoming a professor because I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. I wanted to be a teacher, and for my husband. He's a fairly intelligent guy and he was playing Halo competitively and I just couldn't. When I first met him, it just blew my mind. I was like, why would anyone waste their life away gaming and call themselves a professional gamer? And so he opened my eyes to the possibilities in gaming. And I think the way he did it was really smart because he didn't talk to me about how cool gaming is. He talked to me about how powerful and how influential gaming is. Because nine out of ten kids play games in the US. That's a lot of kids. That's a lot of young people being shaped by one medium. So think about the power it has over shaping our society and what are we doing with that power. Who are the people behind the scenes making the games that these kids play. He didn't talk to me about any of that. It was something that I discovered on my own. He just showed me how influential it was and how good it would be for us to combine our interests of my interest to teach and his interest to make games. And so we wanted to make educational games. So did Girls Make Games start as an educational game? Like? How did the camp emerge from your work with your gaming studio. It wasn't until we started, like we launched our game studio that I went out to gaming conferences and developers conferences and I would be the only, oftentimes the only woman in the room, and definitely the only woman of color in the room, woman of color, non gaming background, so really complete outsider. And it was just very shocking to me because I'd come from banking and research in all these other places where we had a lot more diversity, you know, even though it was male dominated. It was something like maybe fifty five forty five or sixty forty, but not like eighty twenty, which is what gaming is. So it just kind of shocked me. And I wasn't thinking about starting a women's organization or a summer camp company. I just wanted to make games. But I got a sidetracked by the shock. So how did you go for getting sidetracked into creating Girls Make Games? So while I was working on my first game, we were placed hasting it all over the country, going to schools and you know, little fairs and maker fair and things like that, and we would have lots of kids come up having fun with the game. But when we went to the developers conferences, a lot of people would tell us girls are not as interested in making games. When I tried to recruit from my studio, we had about eight job openings and they ended up being all filled by boys, because ninety nine percent of the applications we received were from young men who proclaimed that this was their dream job. And I was just so shocked as I was like, oh my god, it's going to be just me and ten boys making a game. And oftentimes, again in the room, I would be the only one with like different opinion or perspective, and it's just very natural for me to start thinking, if it's gonna be you know, these boys making games, is the game gonna end up being more interesting to boys? Or world girls play this too? And how do I go meet young girls who might be interested in playing or eventually becoming developers. So really the first camp was a social experiment. I'm an economist by training, so it's really important for me to gather empirical data, and so that first camp was sort of my research ground for our game. But by the end of the camp. It was such an emotional experience for so many of the kids, and I remember the last day of camp. We're all crying. The kids were crying. I was crying, the parents are crying. We're all like. I was like, this is so weird. This is not what I expected. You know, the kids that came in and they're talking about this is the one place that I feel like I could be myself. This is the only camp I've been to where I'm not the only girl. I didn't know there were other girls like me who loved playing video games. So hearing those things over and over in different forms just kind of solidified in my mind this something that was needed and it just didn't exist. And so I told my team I'm going to go on a one year hiatus. And that was seven years ago. So I'm still on that hiatus because Girls and Games has just grown from that one camp to sort of a global organization, and especially during COVID going virtual and reaching kids all over the world. It's just been a very unexpected journey, but I know it's something that's needed and that's why we continue to do it. Can you explain what goes on at Girls Make games camps. Yeah, absolutely, so. A lot of it is it's like a regular camp. You show up, you make friends, you play games. You have great counselors who also become your mentors and help guide you through the process. But the really magical thing that happens is the sense of community and belonging because, like I said, for a lot of the kids that come to camp, this is the only place they've been to where they were surrounded by people who look like them. When they have speakers, you know, when we're speakers that come into camp, these are women who work in the industry, great role models, extremely successful leaders. They talk about their journeys and how you know, they didn't know if they wanted to become game developers, and how they ended up to where they are. These are stories they don't get to hear every day, but for fifteen days they're completely immersed in this magical place. In their words, there's a really fun feature where at the end of camp, your team gets to pitch your game to a panel of industry judges, and the judges have included people like Phil Spend who's the head of Xbox, and Sean Leiden, previous head of PlayStations so we'll have a lot of really senior leaders who are judges, and the winning game gets kickstarted and then professionally developed and published. We published a title on the PlayStation. We published a title this year in twenty twenty two on the Nintendo Switch. So that's kind of how the game studio side of my business works, where we're like, we're taking these girls or bringing their vision to life and putting it out on the story so people can play them. That's awesome. So can you talk a little bit more about your your studios because I'm recognizing you have you have separate paths here, so one of them's more altruistic and the other is actually you creating games. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I really the reason I got into the games industry was to make games because I wanted to be a part of it, and I think I still would like to continue making games. It's just in the last years eight years, the only games that we've ended up making have been creatively led and designed by young girls. Can you take us through one of those games? Yeah, like, describe one for us absolutely. One of my favorites, which is coming out next year on the Switch, is called Shredded Secrets. It's actually an anti bullying game. So the game's designed by four young teens from Seattle, and each one of them ended up writing a story arc. So you actually followed through four characters that are in a middle school, three students and a teacher. There's a bully and a victim. So there's a bully and a girl getting bullied, but you get to play through each one and kind of learn what they're going through in their life. And I thought that was so amazing the way the kids approached it, because not only did this show how hard bullying is on the victim, the ultra showed why the bully was acting out and how his life was kind of, you know, whatever he was going through. It wasn't all about hey, he's evil and you're the good one and you know, go fight evil. It was more about building empathy in the player. So as you progress through the game, you're getting to fill in all these different shoes and by the end you kind of walk away with a sense of WHOA, I can't believe thirteen year olds to make this game. So that was amazing. It sounds amazing. So your company is making all the games from the camp or the winner is the only one that's that's the grand prize. That's awesome. Tell me a little bit more about the tech and the types of skills that girls make games actually teaches. You learn everything that goes into making a game from you know, taking your concept that's sort of an abstract idea, an idea like I like cats, to becoming a full game, and that means you know, programming your game, designing your character, so making art for it, animating it, adding sound effects, sometimes even creating and recording those sound effects from you know, everyday objects that are around you, and then putting that into the game, testing it, and finally implement and sharing it with people so they can play your game, so they go through the full indie developer experience, which is I have a dream too, I have a game. I love it now. Some of my favorite games are Fortnite, Rocket League, and some of these games are very violent. Yeah, and how much are you guys focused on making games that don't include violence? Like what role does violence in video games play in girls make games? We're very lucky. We've never really had to talk to anyone and say your game is too violent. At most, we've had maybe cartoonish violence We definitely have shooters. We've had fps's first person shooters, But the context matters. If I'm shooting fruit at you or if I'm shooting paint at you, it feels very different from you know, if there's blood all over the screen. So the mechanic is okay. The context matters. If TV and movies can be violent, so can video games. If TV and movies can move you and change you and educate you, so con video games. So you have to be able to draw those parallels. And we need smart people. We need problem solvers, we need writers, designers, we need all kinds of people to come join us and help build the feature of the industry because we're going places. I mean, gaming is growing so fast. It's already one of the fastest industries. When I tell people that gaming makes more money than music and Hollywood combined, their shock. Yes, right, So video games are pervasive, They're everywhere, and they're going to continue to be everywhere and grow. So it would be awesome if we had more women and diverse people come be a part of the movement. Are there any pitfalls or obstacles that you faced being a woman in the gaming industry that you're able to kind of help your creators avoid as you teach them about making games, but also about being a woman in the gaming industry. Yeah. Absolutely. I think if you ask any woman in the industry, you'll probably get a similar answer, which is that it can be very isolating at times because there's so few of us. There's less than twenty percent of us in the industry, and it's very very visible when you go to events. When we're at home and we're doing our think it's mine, but when we go out and interact with people and when we're at gaming events, it's painfully obvious. And that sort of helps me. Like what helps me is draw parallels with my childhood where I grew up in the Middle East and I was very very aware of being a girl, and I was constantly told I shouldn't do this, or shouldn't do that, or I couldn't do this or that. And what has really helped me in the last almost a decade is the really strong community and sisterhood that we do have with the twenty percent of women that we do. And that's kind of what we're building at Girls Make Games. When these kids come in, they see each other year after year. We have very high retention, nearly seventy to eighty percent retention rate, So kids, once they sign up, they keep coming back. These are people that are going to be part of their journeys and they'll keep in touch and they'll go to college and eventually get jobs. And that's really the best thing you can help for because nobody can make it on their own. We all need a support system and if it doesn't exist, we gotta created for ourselves. So with the seventy to eighty percent retention rate, how are new people getting into this camp? It seems like there's spots are going to seem a little competitive here. How do you get new people? So the nice thing about our camps is that every year, once we have our registrations and we can kind of show up to our partners, which is basically the whole games industry, and say, hey, here are the kids who want to make games. Can you support us? And they've always said yes, So it really it's we have room for everyone. And while we church tuition, we also offer one hundred percent scholarships, so cost has never been an issue. If your family can't afford it, we will offer up to hundred percent financially, Layla. There are billions of gamers, about two point eight billion, forty are women. I play a lot of games online, and I know it can be a rough space. I mean it is. There's racism, misogyny, it's all over the place. How do you solving that and how do you help other women? Stay hopeful that it will be solved eventually when young women kind of come to terms with hey, this is probably going to be a rough career path for me, or hey, is this even going to be possible for me because people don't want me here or something. It's really a matter of time because when we end up, like I said, building that community and we have enough numbers, it's just going to go down with online communities. I mean, this problem exists outside of giving to online anonymity is just it's just what it is. It's ugly. But at the same time, if you can kind of create an alternate space, so I will never believe that the world is going to be a perfect place for anyone. I think as long as we have humans, we're going to have cruelty, We're going to have we're gonna have evil, let's just put it at that. But creating alternate spaces, and I think that's that's where we need to make our investments, Like we need to be able to combat that with saying, hey, this sucks, but you have this other option, that's great. A lot of women play mobile games, not playing online or on consoles, you know, and they don't identify as game or as They'll just say, oh, yeah, I play on my apps. You know, I don't really play games. I play apps. And I'm like, that's the same thing. Yeah, So how do we solve people being mean to people? It's it's a really hard problem. Do you think that the solution is having an alternate safe space? Do you think that's a viable long term solution As a black person, I know, yeah, let's make the safe space somewhere, But it doesn't actually get to the root of the problem, which is that you know, there's there's inherently misogyny here, both in the creating of the games and then in the playing of the game. Yeah. Yeah, and so that's the thing that we have to think about when we implement those safe spaces. Right, as a thirty five year old woman, do why I need a safe space? Now? I feel like I don't because I needed it ten fifteen years ago when I was much younger, and I really I was vulnerable and I needed that support, and I needed to feel confident in the choices that I was making. Now that I've made those choices and I've done well with them, I feel like I can walk into any room and make any any conversation happen. Like if you go back and study how all girls schools influence confidence in girls, why does that work at the middle school, high school age, and why does it not really matter if you have a whole workplace full of women. You know, it doesn't really work at that It so you really have to implement it when it's needed so early in your career, early in your teens, when you're not sure of who you are and if you should be making the choices or the decisions, or if you have if you have the right knowledge or even the potential to succeed somewhere, that's where you need the support. That's It's funny because as you were talking, I was thinking two things. One, what you're to scribing is a greenhouse, yeah, yeah, exactly before you take the plants out. And then the second thing is I as soon as you said that I started to think about all of my friends who went to HBCUs and the ways in which they view themselves as black people in the world versus people like myself and others who went to PWIS who have a quite different experience. I think there's some truth in what you're saying. Can you tell me what does this look like when it's solved for you, like in five to ten years looking ahead, how would you want this problem to look If I could talk to a young girl about gaming and ask her, you know, would you consider working in games? And her answer is not because I think video games are for boys, or because I don't know any of the girls who play games, or any of those things. If it's really because I'm not interested because I want to do X, I want to do this other thing that I'm more interested in. The self selection that happens because of the environment. I think that's that's the problem that we need to solve. Like we don't we don't have to worry about people not choosing gaming because they're not interested in it. We have to worry about people not choosing gaming because of fear, or because of negative stereotypes, or because they just have these misconceptions about it. So as long as we can tackle those things, as long as people have real choice, that they're choosing because they want X or y, and they're not leaning one way or the other because of their environment, I think that would be that would I would consider a success, And in that case, Girls Make Games would be obsolete. It would just be another summer camp, not really the summer camp that girls who like gaming go to. Are you optimistic that this will happen? Oh, one hundred thousand percent. I mean when we started Girls Make Games, we were at twenty two percent of developers identifying as female, and we are close to thirty now that's just in the last seven years. Yeah. Okay. If our listeners are interested in learning more about developing games themselves or helping to support young women in gaming, what can they do and where can they go to learn more to get involved? So for parents, I would say definitely, if you have a kid, if you have a girl who's interested in gaming, center to girls in games. But in general, for people who encounter young women, and I think I don't want to talk about gaming specifically, I think when you encounter young women who are interested in non traditional careers, or non traditional hobbies or any of that. Instead of pointing out how different it is for them to be interested in it, engage them in it. And I think that was one of the best things my parents did for me, was even though I was out in the Middle East and outside, the whole outside world was telling me I'm a girl and I need to behave one way or the other. When I went home, my parents undid all of that damage by talking to me like a regular kid. I wasn't a frail little girl who needed all this protection in the world. I could have all the dreams that I wanted and all kinds of ambitions, and I could be prime minister or you know, scientists or any of that, all that stuff that wasn't possible outside. And then for if you're working in a corporate setting, the same goes for you know, your female colleagues. Like it's it's so much harder for us to just try to pretend that we're all the same and we're all in the same boat. But life is just we've we've had to overcome so many more obstacles. I mean, it's seeing a successful woman in tech or a successful woman in gaming is really you are seeing you're kind of observing a unicorn and so kind of making that a norm, you know, we don't. We don't need it to be an exception. I've one of my least favorite stereotypes on TV is like that trope of that one woman in the computer science or in the tech classroom who is also a genius. I don't think we need that double burden to be like the minority who's also a genius. I think, you know, like and get to be an average minority because being averages and you know that's hourage, that's what normal people are. It's a privilege, right, Yeah, So that's just such a burden to to be like, oh, I'm a girl in gaming. That means I have to be really really good otherwise I represent all girls and if I suck, all girls suck. Yeah. Yeah, I think the progress thoroughly comes down to, like, I'm just an average developer. I'm just any one of them exactly. So where can we find the games that you guys have developed? I know I want to check them out, and I'm sure our listeners do too. So we've actually developed six games and they are They can be found on the Girls Man Games website. There's a tab called games. We started publishing in twenty fourteen. Blub Blub Quest of the Blob is out on Steam and Xbox. The Whole Story is out on Steam. Intrafectorium is out on Steam and PlayStation. Find Me just came out on PlayStation last year. It's also on Steam, and Shredded Secrets just came out this year in twenty twenty two on the Nintendo Switch. It's our first Switch title and we're so excited. Layla, thank you so much for being with us today. Oh absolutely, it's my pleasure. Laylashim Beer is the co founder and CEO of Girls Make Games. Layla attended MIT and pursued finance at Black Rock, followed by economic research at the Brookings Institution before moving into the world video games. In twenty fourteen, game Industry dot biz named Layla a Games Industry Person of the Year. Layla has a personal goal to teach one million girls how to make games through her work. If you want to learn more about game development or any of the games that Layla's studios helped to produce, check out the links in our show notes. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah Booking by Lisa Dunn, Editorial support from Keyshell Williams. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mia Bell. I'm Ronald Young Junior. Thanks for listening before we go. We know you're used to hearing the show every week, but just want to let you know the next episode of Solvable will be released at the beginning of next month. It will be well worth the way, so stay tuned and once again, thanks for listening.

Pushkin. This is solvable. I'm Ronald Young Junior. I wasn't thinking about starting a women's organization or a summer camp company. I just wanted to make games. About two point eight billion people play video games worldwide, from Fortnite to Rocket League, my personal favorite. Gaming is a popular form of entertainment, relaxation, and a way to connect with friends and sometimes strangers. When I started Girls Make Games, I really wasn't very familiar with gaming, and I did grow up playing on my Atari and some arcade games like street Fighter or Teken, but that was the extent of it. That's Layla Shaber. She's the co founder and CEO of Girls Make Games, an organization that aims to introduce game design to young girls. Many people, including me my, spend a lot of time gaming, but rarely take the time to think about who's making these games and what goes into development. And that means you know, programming your game, designing your character, making art for it, animating it, adding sound effects, sometimes even creating and recording those sound effects from everyday objects that are around you, testing it, and finally implementing and sharing it with people so they can play your game. She founded a game studio with her husband, but when it came to hiring, she realized just how underrepresented women are in the gaming industry. She launched an annual summer camp to solve that problem. And it was just very shocking to me because I'd come from banking and research in all these other places where we had a lot more diversity, you know, even though it was male dominated. It was something like maybe fifty five forty five or sixty forty, but not like eighty twenty, which is what gaming is. Layla's husband was a professional gamer himself, and he introduced her to the kinds of opportunities the world of gaming provides. He didn't talk to me about how cool gaming is. He talked to me about how powerful and how influential gaming is. Because nine out of ten kids play games in the US. That's a lot of kids. That's a lot of young people being shaped by one medium. Nearly fifty percent of people who play video games identify as female, but less than thirty percent of game developers or women. This is a problem that we can solve. I was working in research and kind of on my way to getting a PhD eventually and becoming a professor because I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. I wanted to be a teacher, and for my husband. He's a fairly intelligent guy and he was playing Halo competitively and I just couldn't. When I first met him, it just blew my mind. I was like, why would anyone waste their life away gaming and call themselves a professional gamer? And so he opened my eyes to the possibilities in gaming. And I think the way he did it was really smart because he didn't talk to me about how cool gaming is. He talked to me about how powerful and how influential gaming is. Because nine out of ten kids play games in the US. That's a lot of kids. That's a lot of young people being shaped by one medium. So think about the power it has over shaping our society and what are we doing with that power. Who are the people behind the scenes making the games that these kids play. He didn't talk to me about any of that. It was something that I discovered on my own. He just showed me how influential it was and how good it would be for us to combine our interests of my interest to teach and his interest to make games. And so we wanted to make educational games. So did Girls Make Games start as an educational game? Like? How did the camp emerge from your work with your gaming studio. It wasn't until we started, like we launched our game studio that I went out to gaming conferences and developers conferences and I would be the only, oftentimes the only woman in the room, and definitely the only woman of color in the room, woman of color, non gaming background, so really complete outsider. And it was just very shocking to me because I'd come from banking and research in all these other places where we had a lot more diversity, you know, even though it was male dominated. It was something like maybe fifty five forty five or sixty forty, but not like eighty twenty, which is what gaming is. So it just kind of shocked me. And I wasn't thinking about starting a women's organization or a summer camp company. I just wanted to make games. But I got a sidetracked by the shock. So how did you go for getting sidetracked into creating Girls Make Games? So while I was working on my first game, we were placed hasting it all over the country, going to schools and you know, little fairs and maker fair and things like that, and we would have lots of kids come up having fun with the game. But when we went to the developers conferences, a lot of people would tell us girls are not as interested in making games. When I tried to recruit from my studio, we had about eight job openings and they ended up being all filled by boys, because ninety nine percent of the applications we received were from young men who proclaimed that this was their dream job. And I was just so shocked as I was like, oh my god, it's going to be just me and ten boys making a game. And oftentimes, again in the room, I would be the only one with like different opinion or perspective, and it's just very natural for me to start thinking, if it's gonna be you know, these boys making games, is the game gonna end up being more interesting to boys? Or world girls play this too? And how do I go meet young girls who might be interested in playing or eventually becoming developers. So really the first camp was a social experiment. I'm an economist by training, so it's really important for me to gather empirical data, and so that first camp was sort of my research ground for our game. But by the end of the camp. It was such an emotional experience for so many of the kids, and I remember the last day of camp. We're all crying. The kids were crying. I was crying, the parents are crying. We're all like. I was like, this is so weird. This is not what I expected. You know, the kids that came in and they're talking about this is the one place that I feel like I could be myself. This is the only camp I've been to where I'm not the only girl. I didn't know there were other girls like me who loved playing video games. So hearing those things over and over in different forms just kind of solidified in my mind this something that was needed and it just didn't exist. And so I told my team I'm going to go on a one year hiatus. And that was seven years ago. So I'm still on that hiatus because Girls and Games has just grown from that one camp to sort of a global organization, and especially during COVID going virtual and reaching kids all over the world. It's just been a very unexpected journey, but I know it's something that's needed and that's why we continue to do it. Can you explain what goes on at Girls Make games camps. Yeah, absolutely, so. A lot of it is it's like a regular camp. You show up, you make friends, you play games. You have great counselors who also become your mentors and help guide you through the process. But the really magical thing that happens is the sense of community and belonging because, like I said, for a lot of the kids that come to camp, this is the only place they've been to where they were surrounded by people who look like them. When they have speakers, you know, when we're speakers that come into camp, these are women who work in the industry, great role models, extremely successful leaders. They talk about their journeys and how you know, they didn't know if they wanted to become game developers, and how they ended up to where they are. These are stories they don't get to hear every day, but for fifteen days they're completely immersed in this magical place. In their words, there's a really fun feature where at the end of camp, your team gets to pitch your game to a panel of industry judges, and the judges have included people like Phil Spend who's the head of Xbox, and Sean Leiden, previous head of PlayStations so we'll have a lot of really senior leaders who are judges, and the winning game gets kickstarted and then professionally developed and published. We published a title on the PlayStation. We published a title this year in twenty twenty two on the Nintendo Switch. So that's kind of how the game studio side of my business works, where we're like, we're taking these girls or bringing their vision to life and putting it out on the story so people can play them. That's awesome. So can you talk a little bit more about your your studios because I'm recognizing you have you have separate paths here, so one of them's more altruistic and the other is actually you creating games. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I really the reason I got into the games industry was to make games because I wanted to be a part of it, and I think I still would like to continue making games. It's just in the last years eight years, the only games that we've ended up making have been creatively led and designed by young girls. Can you take us through one of those games? Yeah, like, describe one for us absolutely. One of my favorites, which is coming out next year on the Switch, is called Shredded Secrets. It's actually an anti bullying game. So the game's designed by four young teens from Seattle, and each one of them ended up writing a story arc. So you actually followed through four characters that are in a middle school, three students and a teacher. There's a bully and a victim. So there's a bully and a girl getting bullied, but you get to play through each one and kind of learn what they're going through in their life. And I thought that was so amazing the way the kids approached it, because not only did this show how hard bullying is on the victim, the ultra showed why the bully was acting out and how his life was kind of, you know, whatever he was going through. It wasn't all about hey, he's evil and you're the good one and you know, go fight evil. It was more about building empathy in the player. So as you progress through the game, you're getting to fill in all these different shoes and by the end you kind of walk away with a sense of WHOA, I can't believe thirteen year olds to make this game. So that was amazing. It sounds amazing. So your company is making all the games from the camp or the winner is the only one that's that's the grand prize. That's awesome. Tell me a little bit more about the tech and the types of skills that girls make games actually teaches. You learn everything that goes into making a game from you know, taking your concept that's sort of an abstract idea, an idea like I like cats, to becoming a full game, and that means you know, programming your game, designing your character, so making art for it, animating it, adding sound effects, sometimes even creating and recording those sound effects from you know, everyday objects that are around you, and then putting that into the game, testing it, and finally implement and sharing it with people so they can play your game, so they go through the full indie developer experience, which is I have a dream too, I have a game. I love it now. Some of my favorite games are Fortnite, Rocket League, and some of these games are very violent. Yeah, and how much are you guys focused on making games that don't include violence? Like what role does violence in video games play in girls make games? We're very lucky. We've never really had to talk to anyone and say your game is too violent. At most, we've had maybe cartoonish violence We definitely have shooters. We've had fps's first person shooters, But the context matters. If I'm shooting fruit at you or if I'm shooting paint at you, it feels very different from you know, if there's blood all over the screen. So the mechanic is okay. The context matters. If TV and movies can be violent, so can video games. If TV and movies can move you and change you and educate you, so con video games. So you have to be able to draw those parallels. And we need smart people. We need problem solvers, we need writers, designers, we need all kinds of people to come join us and help build the feature of the industry because we're going places. I mean, gaming is growing so fast. It's already one of the fastest industries. When I tell people that gaming makes more money than music and Hollywood combined, their shock. Yes, right, So video games are pervasive, They're everywhere, and they're going to continue to be everywhere and grow. So it would be awesome if we had more women and diverse people come be a part of the movement. Are there any pitfalls or obstacles that you faced being a woman in the gaming industry that you're able to kind of help your creators avoid as you teach them about making games, but also about being a woman in the gaming industry. Yeah. Absolutely. I think if you ask any woman in the industry, you'll probably get a similar answer, which is that it can be very isolating at times because there's so few of us. There's less than twenty percent of us in the industry, and it's very very visible when you go to events. When we're at home and we're doing our think it's mine, but when we go out and interact with people and when we're at gaming events, it's painfully obvious. And that sort of helps me. Like what helps me is draw parallels with my childhood where I grew up in the Middle East and I was very very aware of being a girl, and I was constantly told I shouldn't do this, or shouldn't do that, or I couldn't do this or that. And what has really helped me in the last almost a decade is the really strong community and sisterhood that we do have with the twenty percent of women that we do. And that's kind of what we're building at Girls Make Games. When these kids come in, they see each other year after year. We have very high retention, nearly seventy to eighty percent retention rate, So kids, once they sign up, they keep coming back. These are people that are going to be part of their journeys and they'll keep in touch and they'll go to college and eventually get jobs. And that's really the best thing you can help for because nobody can make it on their own. We all need a support system and if it doesn't exist, we gotta created for ourselves. So with the seventy to eighty percent retention rate, how are new people getting into this camp? It seems like there's spots are going to seem a little competitive here. How do you get new people? So the nice thing about our camps is that every year, once we have our registrations and we can kind of show up to our partners, which is basically the whole games industry, and say, hey, here are the kids who want to make games. Can you support us? And they've always said yes, So it really it's we have room for everyone. And while we church tuition, we also offer one hundred percent scholarships, so cost has never been an issue. If your family can't afford it, we will offer up to hundred percent financially, Layla. There are billions of gamers, about two point eight billion, forty are women. I play a lot of games online, and I know it can be a rough space. I mean it is. There's racism, misogyny, it's all over the place. How do you solving that and how do you help other women? Stay hopeful that it will be solved eventually when young women kind of come to terms with hey, this is probably going to be a rough career path for me, or hey, is this even going to be possible for me because people don't want me here or something. It's really a matter of time because when we end up, like I said, building that community and we have enough numbers, it's just going to go down with online communities. I mean, this problem exists outside of giving to online anonymity is just it's just what it is. It's ugly. But at the same time, if you can kind of create an alternate space, so I will never believe that the world is going to be a perfect place for anyone. I think as long as we have humans, we're going to have cruelty, We're going to have we're gonna have evil, let's just put it at that. But creating alternate spaces, and I think that's that's where we need to make our investments, Like we need to be able to combat that with saying, hey, this sucks, but you have this other option, that's great. A lot of women play mobile games, not playing online or on consoles, you know, and they don't identify as game or as They'll just say, oh, yeah, I play on my apps. You know, I don't really play games. I play apps. And I'm like, that's the same thing. Yeah, So how do we solve people being mean to people? It's it's a really hard problem. Do you think that the solution is having an alternate safe space? Do you think that's a viable long term solution As a black person, I know, yeah, let's make the safe space somewhere, But it doesn't actually get to the root of the problem, which is that you know, there's there's inherently misogyny here, both in the creating of the games and then in the playing of the game. Yeah. Yeah, and so that's the thing that we have to think about when we implement those safe spaces. Right, as a thirty five year old woman, do why I need a safe space? Now? I feel like I don't because I needed it ten fifteen years ago when I was much younger, and I really I was vulnerable and I needed that support, and I needed to feel confident in the choices that I was making. Now that I've made those choices and I've done well with them, I feel like I can walk into any room and make any any conversation happen. Like if you go back and study how all girls schools influence confidence in girls, why does that work at the middle school, high school age, and why does it not really matter if you have a whole workplace full of women. You know, it doesn't really work at that It so you really have to implement it when it's needed so early in your career, early in your teens, when you're not sure of who you are and if you should be making the choices or the decisions, or if you have if you have the right knowledge or even the potential to succeed somewhere, that's where you need the support. That's It's funny because as you were talking, I was thinking two things. One, what you're to scribing is a greenhouse, yeah, yeah, exactly before you take the plants out. And then the second thing is I as soon as you said that I started to think about all of my friends who went to HBCUs and the ways in which they view themselves as black people in the world versus people like myself and others who went to PWIS who have a quite different experience. I think there's some truth in what you're saying. Can you tell me what does this look like when it's solved for you, like in five to ten years looking ahead, how would you want this problem to look If I could talk to a young girl about gaming and ask her, you know, would you consider working in games? And her answer is not because I think video games are for boys, or because I don't know any of the girls who play games, or any of those things. If it's really because I'm not interested because I want to do X, I want to do this other thing that I'm more interested in. The self selection that happens because of the environment. I think that's that's the problem that we need to solve. Like we don't we don't have to worry about people not choosing gaming because they're not interested in it. We have to worry about people not choosing gaming because of fear, or because of negative stereotypes, or because they just have these misconceptions about it. So as long as we can tackle those things, as long as people have real choice, that they're choosing because they want X or y, and they're not leaning one way or the other because of their environment, I think that would be that would I would consider a success, And in that case, Girls Make Games would be obsolete. It would just be another summer camp, not really the summer camp that girls who like gaming go to. Are you optimistic that this will happen? Oh, one hundred thousand percent. I mean when we started Girls Make Games, we were at twenty two percent of developers identifying as female, and we are close to thirty now that's just in the last seven years. Yeah. Okay. If our listeners are interested in learning more about developing games themselves or helping to support young women in gaming, what can they do and where can they go to learn more to get involved? So for parents, I would say definitely, if you have a kid, if you have a girl who's interested in gaming, center to girls in games. But in general, for people who encounter young women, and I think I don't want to talk about gaming specifically, I think when you encounter young women who are interested in non traditional careers, or non traditional hobbies or any of that. Instead of pointing out how different it is for them to be interested in it, engage them in it. And I think that was one of the best things my parents did for me, was even though I was out in the Middle East and outside, the whole outside world was telling me I'm a girl and I need to behave one way or the other. When I went home, my parents undid all of that damage by talking to me like a regular kid. I wasn't a frail little girl who needed all this protection in the world. I could have all the dreams that I wanted and all kinds of ambitions, and I could be prime minister or you know, scientists or any of that, all that stuff that wasn't possible outside. And then for if you're working in a corporate setting, the same goes for you know, your female colleagues. Like it's it's so much harder for us to just try to pretend that we're all the same and we're all in the same boat. But life is just we've we've had to overcome so many more obstacles. I mean, it's seeing a successful woman in tech or a successful woman in gaming is really you are seeing you're kind of observing a unicorn and so kind of making that a norm, you know, we don't. We don't need it to be an exception. I've one of my least favorite stereotypes on TV is like that trope of that one woman in the computer science or in the tech classroom who is also a genius. I don't think we need that double burden to be like the minority who's also a genius. I think, you know, like and get to be an average minority because being averages and you know that's hourage, that's what normal people are. It's a privilege, right, Yeah, So that's just such a burden to to be like, oh, I'm a girl in gaming. That means I have to be really really good otherwise I represent all girls and if I suck, all girls suck. Yeah. Yeah, I think the progress thoroughly comes down to, like, I'm just an average developer. I'm just any one of them exactly. So where can we find the games that you guys have developed? I know I want to check them out, and I'm sure our listeners do too. So we've actually developed six games and they are They can be found on the Girls Man Games website. There's a tab called games. We started publishing in twenty fourteen. Blub Blub Quest of the Blob is out on Steam and Xbox. The Whole Story is out on Steam. Intrafectorium is out on Steam and PlayStation. Find Me just came out on PlayStation last year. It's also on Steam, and Shredded Secrets just came out this year in twenty twenty two on the Nintendo Switch. It's our first Switch title and we're so excited. Layla, thank you so much for being with us today. Oh absolutely, it's my pleasure. Laylashim Beer is the co founder and CEO of Girls Make Games. Layla attended MIT and pursued finance at Black Rock, followed by economic research at the Brookings Institution before moving into the world video games. In twenty fourteen, game Industry dot biz named Layla a Games Industry Person of the Year. Layla has a personal goal to teach one million girls how to make games through her work. If you want to learn more about game development or any of the games that Layla's studios helped to produce, check out the links in our show notes. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah Booking by Lisa Dunn, Editorial support from Keyshell Williams. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mia Bell. I'm Ronald Young Junior. Thanks for listening before we go. We know you're used to hearing the show every week, but just want to let you know the next episode of Solvable will be released at the beginning of next month. It will be well worth the way, so stay tuned and once again, thanks for listening.