A look back at what happened this year. A public storage of my memories and wishes for the future.

Previously: Pt. 4 :: Half a year without an income

I make games. This is one of my artistic outlets but is also my job. I need it as a way of self expression, yet it’s also work I do for other game studios for a comfortable pay. I’ve been doing this professionally for more than seven years. I love this medium, both for the development process itself and the act of playing. All of this is never a question at the #FemDevsMeetup.

It’s hard to remember a time without this community. I can tell you, I was scared. I decided to get in this industry now ten years ago. I don’t feel the need to explain what happened in 2013. But even before, my love for video games was not only mocked, it was also challenged. The Lara Croft Effect was nothing but a lucky accident, and yet, as a kid, I also wanted to be like her.

I came up with my first video game idea before I started primary school. I wanted to be Princess Peach in Doom. I understood nothing about licenses. Life was easier. I would play pretend non-existing games with a cardboard box as a screen and a broken keyboard that my dad gave me, or sit in front of his analog mixer and mess up the setup because it was my spaceship command board. I learned to write in lower case with the MS-DOS interface.

A few years later I was using Netscape at my mom’s office to play smaller but fascinating games hosted in kids TV websites. I learned about Flash and Shockwave and that’s the first time I could tell apart vector and raster graphics (I only heard of the actual terms many years later at university).

I like sharing these bits of my life at our meetups, on exchange of other people’s stories. And since these are very personal parts of myself, I find it incredibly insulting that I must share them on request with total strangers, otherwise I will fail their authenticity test, which often reeks of elitism.

The question is usually similar in form (“So, how did you end up making games?”), but the implications are quite different. At the FemDevs, it is so we can recognize ourselves in each other. I’m not strange anymore. I’m not the sole representative of my whole gender in the room. There are many ways of being, of existing, and experiencing our relationship with our hobbies and professions. Mine is just another story.

It’s been now 6 years since Linda Rendel started this group and 5 since I joined together with Sylvia Ulloque and Leonie Wolf for organizing our annual game jam. Now the team has grown, we have online events, portfolio feedback sessions, art hangouts and we are carefully back to doing on-site meetups in a bunch of German cities, everything out of our free time. I even recently gave a talk on the joys and pains of working in this industry.

When I walk through that door in this or that networking space we borrow, I get welcomed with the nervous smile of the newcomers, a shiny “Casi!!✨” yelled from the other side of the room, the smell of coffee and cake, and the absolute conviction that every single one of us loves and makes video games.

Also, we should get again vegan duck for the Fem Devs Game Jam catering this year.

Next: Pt. 6 :: Winning an award :: 💜. Take care.