This document discusses issues around gender and culture in programming, games, and electronic literature. It provides statistics showing gender disparities in various tech fields. It also examines the "brogrammer" stereotype and culture and how that can discourage women. Several passages discuss feminist approaches to coding and creating digital works, as well as debates around the purpose and history of tools like Twine. The document presents a variety of perspectives on these topics from scholars and creators in the field.

1. Code Before Content?
Brogrammer Culture in Games and Electronic Literature
Anastasia Salter
University of Central Florida
@anasalter
http://anastasiasalter.net

3. “the brogrammer effect”
Jordan Weissmann

4. “the problem is that aside from those few guys reveling in their
spray-tanned fantasy ‘brogrammer’ masculinity, very few people
in programming identify with the term ‘brogrammer’. The
brogrammer is always someone else-- he is THOSE Facebook guys
who yell too loudly at parties and wave bottles in the air, he is
not the nice, shy guy who gets paid 30% more because of his
race, gender and appeal to the boy-genius fetishes of VCs…in
reality, programmers in Silicon Valley can be fully and invisibly
privileged without ever touching a Grey Goose bottle-service
setup or a tube of hair gel”
Kate Losse

8. Women in the Games Industry
Programmers and Engineers: 5%
Artists and Animators: 9%
Game Designers: 13%
Producers: 22%
Audio Professionals: 9%
QA Testers: 12%
Business and Management: 21%
Gamasutra Salary Survey 2014

10. #1ReasonWhy Tweet Themes
Gendered Assumptions
Rape and Sexual Harassment
Overt Sexualization
Silencing
Harassment
7,780 tweets (November 26-30 2012) collected and analyzed with Bridget Blodgett

12. #1reasonwhy because a boss
interchanged the terms ‘configure’ and
‘rape.’ So every morning we met to
plan how we would rape the
computers

13. Yes, make 2012 your year of code. Learn to code. Not
only is it a critical skill for DH folks, but coding should also
be considered a basic literacy. I have been coding since I
was 10 years old, when I learned BASIC (and its GOTOs)
on my Commodore 64, one of the first popular home
computers. I learned to code not because I had specific
problems I wanted to solve; instead, coding was (and is)
fun, a way of thinking, a way of making the computer do
neat things, and an entry into a fascinating and rich
culture.
Michael Widner
“Learn to Code; Learn Code Culture”
HASTAC 2012

16. Should you choose to learn in a group setting, you will
immediately be conspicuous. It might be hard to see why
this is a problem; after all, everyone wants more women
in programming. Surely people are glad you’re there.
Well, that’s true, as far as it goes. But it also makes you
extremely conscious of your mistakes, confusion, and skill
level. You are there as a representative of every woman.
If you mess up or need extra clarification, it’s because
you really shouldn’t — you suspected this anyway — you
shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Miriam Posner
“Some Things to Think About Before You Exhort Everyone to Code”
2012

18. Articulating a need for a feminist corrective in the digital
humanities has come at a much slower pace, perhaps
because the instrumentalism of a "tool" seems much less
blatantly anti-feminist than the instrumentalism of a gun.
Elizabeth Losh
“What can the digital humanities learn from feminist game studies?”
Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.2, 2015

19. Jeremy Douglass proposes three distinct areas of code as
feminist act: code feminism, which is made to be used
and executed for a feminist purpose; feminist codework,
which is code-like but not intended to be run; and
feminist code, which is “executable, syntactically
subversive embedded language or new programming
[code] languages affording a fundamentally different
feminist paradigm for software development.
Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014

22. Could this have been a feminist act? To a certain extent, the
surface narrative is a feminist one, an explosion of surreal sex and
violence couched in a game/narrative with no real resolution.
However, my own sense of The princess murderer as a
‘transgressive’ text did not seem to be derived from the narrative.
Rather I felt that I was treading on a male preserve - programming
code - and appropriating it to ‘perform’ the narrative. It was at
that point that the programming code started to infest the
narrative itself - any attempt to separate them seemed superficial.
geniwate on making The princess murderer (2003, with Deena Larsen)
Electronic Book Review
January 28, 2005

27. I wrote Tournedo Gorge because I
wanted to mash the space of
computation with the female,
domestic, and tactile.
Kathi Inman Berens
Tournedo Gorge
2012

30. No wonder hypertext fiction had a lull–they
hid behind middle-upper class literary
pretensions, acting like it was some kind of
avant-garde science. I’m seeing academic
essays on hypertext buried behind passwords,
I’m seeing a hypertext editor like Twine for
$300, I’m seeing stories selling for $30. How
many people are buying those?
Porpentine
“Creation Under Capitalism and the Twine Revolution”
2012

33. “It’s made in Twine, because
nothing says ‘hey, that’s not
really a game!’ like Twine”
Dietrich Squinkifer

34. An example might be found in those who see Twine as a new means to facilitate
non-traditional creators’ voices in games, and those who see Twine as an
unexpected resurgence of hypertext fiction for the web. For the former group, the
association with a prior (and largely white and male) tradition exerts an unwelcome
colonizing force that undermines the liberationist possibilities of the platform and its
practitioners. For the latter, the refusal to acknowledge said lineage signals a
blinkered ahistoricism that, in refusing to answer for the shift from (e-)literature to
games, posits a cultural and aesthetic move for which it has no theory or
justification—a situation that might even undermine its ultimate mission. It’s
possible that this conflict cannot be reconciled, at least not in the present. Would
that really be such a calamity? Does it not signal the unexpected richness and
intrigue of the topic, rather than suggest that one “side” is righteous and the other
wicked?
Ian Bogost

38. Thank you!
Anastasia Salter
@anasalter
http://anastasiasalter.net