Summer Game Fest is a pretty big deal now, especially with the loss of E3. We’ve been reporting on the biggest hits from the showcase – I was most impressed with the Xbox presentation – and there were plenty of new and highly anticipated games to be seen. What we didn’t see, at least at Geoff Keighley’s opening ceremony, was a single woman.
Host and organiser Geoff Keighley has been criticised for not having any women on stage during the almost two-hour curtain raiser showcase, in which a number of people were brought onstage for interviews. We saw Nicolas Cage, who talked about his Dead by Daylight character. We saw Sam Lake talk about Alan Wake 2, industry veteran Ed Boon talk about Mortal Kombat 1, and Bryan Intihar to talk about Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Keighley presented the whole thing himself, unlike The Game Awards, where he has typically been assisted by Sydnee Goodman. Here, there were no women to be seen.
This was especially jarring when compared with later showcases. Xbox’s was hosted by Sarah Bond, Xbox’s corporate vice president of game creator experience and ecosystem. Day of the Devs had plenty of women, as did Devolver’s very surreal Digital Conference. It’s not like women aren’t making video games, or that developers aren’t diverse. They very much are. But you wouldn’t be able to tell from Keighley’s version of Summer Game Fest.
Somehow, it got worse. In an interview with CBC, Keighley acknowledged that the all-male lineup was fair to criticise, but that a single woman had been due to appear at one point: actress Melanie Liburd, who plays Saga Anderson in Alan Wake 2. She couldn’t make it due to a scheduling conflict. “We also want to be authentic to the games that are being presented on the show and the developers that are making them," Keighley said. So if she’d made it, we would have seen one woman on stage. Incredible effort.
This is on Keighley, but it’s also on developers to make an attempt to put forward marginalised employees for opportunities like this. It was a shame to see established men in the scene like Boon, Lake, and Intihar all take up time on the stage, when some of that time could have been given to women to talk about their work on the games shown. At least send a woman on stage with them, good lord. I wanted to see women being recognised for their contributions to gaming. They are already involved, it’s just that for some reason, they aren’t given the opportunity to talk about their work as much as men are.
It’s a shameful but known fact that the game industry is largely a playground for men, as women attending expos like GDC get drugged and abused. Female protagonists are regularly criticised for not being sexy or pretty enough, even when it has zero relevance to the story. Women journalists who cover games are dogpiled regularly for daring to talk about diversity or representation. While women’s stories are being told in games, the industry is still hesitant to showcase women talking about the games they make, and that’s embarrassing.
Summer Game Fest is supposed to be about the future of gaming, but it’s stuck firmly in the past. It had an opportunity as one of the biggest gaming events of the year to break from the narrative of games being made by men, for men, but it didn’t. It’s painful to see, and I’m hoping the criticism will tip the next Summer Game Fest in the direction of having more than zero women on stage. It’s not like it could get any worse.