Female video game designers

Sony Online Entertainment has come out with a G.I.R.L (Gamers in Real Life) $10,000 Scholarship and internship, which is for female students aged over 18 in any field relating to video game design and development. The objective is to encourage more female video game designers and make gaming studios gender balanced. If girls have the aptitude for video game design they will get into the industry no matter what. An example is Stephanie Gelish, pictured above at the Champlain College computer science lab in 2005. From Melville NY, Stephanie got into gaming in the fifth grade with her first PlayStation. Gelish later started getting ideas on how to make the games better and discovered that she could make money playing video games, "I took a designing course, and I found out that at some colleges you can actually major in electronic gaming. I decided right then that's what I would study — and that some day, I'd be a video game designer....game developers right out of college can make more than $50,000 a year!"

Annoyed by male dominated gaming clubs, Stephanie Gelish started a campus gaming club just for girls called GameHers. Since Champlain college had a policy against single-sex clubs, it took a lot of back and forth before GameHers was alloted $1500. Stephanie told CosmoGirl! in 2006: "My hope is that the next generation of girls will grow up without the stereotype that technology is a 'guy thing'. I'm living proof that it's not!" Since then Stephanie went into the related fields of graphic design, web design, 2d and 3d animation, and is currently working for animal rights. So video games scholarships for girls are a good thing but will not create female designers; they've got to have an aptitude for it. On the issue of male domination in the video game industry Gelish told Burlington press: "Girls don't have any power in the industry. They're not getting their ideas in the games."