Breaking Arrows is a Soapbox series published by Highland Arrow relating the views and opinions of smaller developers, independent journalists, and gamers, related to the GamerGate movement. To read more about it, read the lead article here.
For those that don’t know you, can you introduce yourself?
My name is Jennifer Dawe, I am a video game artist and designer.
How long have you been in the games industry?
11 years professionally. I was modding and doing pixel art prior to that.
What brought you to be interested in games? And the game industry?
I've been gaming since I was about 4 years old when we got our first computer. When I was in college I met other people online who wanted to work on games with me so we started a game together. I was mostly an Animator and Administrator/Mod at the time but I've slowly became more of a developer as it became necessary.
Over the years there have been a series of scandals in the games industry. Does any particular one have meaning to you?
There have been a few articles here or there that caught my attention, but none that really blew up that related to my personal experience in the industry like #Gamergate . There were many issues I noticed with how female harassment was being used to boost articles or get attention onto certain people and avoiding those that chose not to wear the badge of victimhood. If you're treated well in this industry you're basically invisible and I thought that was an issue worth talking about and it wasn't to many until GamerGate happened.
Do you think the Industry needs to improve? If so in what areas?
If we want a positive industry it needs to be about the games again.
It needs to be about what people do not what they say.
What would you say the games industry does right? Wrong?
We have a wide variety of games, but I think the reason so many people think certain games don't exist is because we're really bad at categorizing them and almost opposed to categorizing them because we believe it marginalizes them somehow. It causes a lot of fighting because gamers aren't able to find what they want as we're trying to cram all the games into a few vague genres.
Where do you see the industry moving forward?
I think things are going to get worse before they get better. I hope we can realize that people don't have a problem with "social messages" they have a problem with social messages that are touted as a quality product for their social message and not because they actually are one. People are oversimplifying issues and it's not going to lead to better games, it's going to lead to stagnation.
