73. Women in tech and tackling diversity in gaming, with Constance Fleuriot

We're kicking off season four of The Creative Boom Podcast with Constance Fleuriot – a writer, games developer and producer based in Bristol who runs her own game design company, Pretty Digital. Constance also runs Grrrl Games to support women and girls of all ages to make games. A big part of her practice is helping people to develop ideas and research plans – and she encourages people of all ages to be creative producers, rather than consumers. Her work history includes creative technologies research for HP, Intel, NESTAfuturelab, pmstudio/Watershed and various community-based and educational organisations. She’s also part of the University of West of England team delivering the MSc in Data Science. In this episode, we talk about women and girls in gaming, why there still aren't enough of us and how we can inspire more to join the industry. We talk of diversity in gaming overall and whether any progress has been made in recent years. We consider gender roles and identity and why it's important to create female as well as gender-neutral video game characters. And there's a delve into the creative process of game design, and why you don't need to know how to use a computer to get started. For anyone interested in making video games, Constance is hosting a course at Clayhill Arts in Somerset from 13 to 15 May 2022. Titled Creating Stories: Game Design For Complete Beginners, it will show participants how to experiment with this rapidly-growing medium using simple, analogue tools. Season Four of The Creative Boom Podcast is kindly sponsored by Astropad Studio.