The video game industry is dominated by men, which means that games tend to have fewer female characters and the ones that do exist are often highly sexualized. International nonprofit Girls Who Code is looking to close that gap by launching Girls Who Code Girls, a mobile and desktop experience that allows users to program their own avatars.
“By turning users into creators, we’re empowering our community to use coding to upend the status quo and imagine a future where they can harness their passion and creativity into a career in tech,” Girls Who Code CEO Tarika Barrett said in a statement. “We want our students to know that they deserve to take up space in gaming and game development, and can create characters that reflect the best parts of who they are.”
Creative coding
Developed with creative agency Mojo Supermarket and interactive production studio Make Me Pulse, Girls Who Code Girls launched on Dec. 5 to kick off Computer Science Education Week. It teaches users four programming languages—CSS, HTML, JavaScript and Python—so that they can develop a custom avatar, adjusting their clothing, hairstyle, body type and skin tone. Users can then share their creation on social media and add it to a licensable gallery of characters that will be shared with game developers to inspire future projects.
(Captions for the video have not been made available to Adweek. We will update the video once captions have been provided.)Mojo Supermarket, Girls Who Code
“With Girls Who Code Girls, we set out to accomplish two goals,” Mojo Supermarket group creative director Kate Carter said in a statement. “First, provide girls and young women with a fun, creative entry point to trying out code. And second, to draw attention to the fact that if more women coded video game characters they would look more like real women. Our ambition is that with every line of code you type, you can influence the future of women in gaming.”
The effort was promoted with a 20-second launch video featuring content creators @leeshcapeesh and @sewpheeyuh showing how the tool can be used as an antidote to the scantily clad female characters found in most games. Girls Who Code shared the video across its social media channels.
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