The Presence of Female Designers in French Video Game Industry, 1985–1993

Abstract

Increasingly, more people do notice that female designers wrote their first games in the 1970s and 1980s. However, there was another country where women did also design games decades before the #GamerGate movement. This article examines the selected works of three French designers: Clotilde Marion, Chine Lanzmann, and Muriel Tramis. The analysis of those games took into account the self-representation of those designers—and women in general—within the game content. The conducted research has proven that within their games, Marion, Lanzmann, and Tramis included their everyday experiences as women. Using such techniques as simulated point of view and authorial signature, those women indicated their own role in the development and showed how females in general face male oppression against them. This means that the United States is not the only country with a long tradition of female game developers. Thus, video game history remains an undiscovered research field.