Game Changers | Laila Shabir, Girls Make Games
Game Changers | Laila Shabir, Girls Make Games
Game Changers | Laila Shabir, Girls Make Games
By Marie Dealessandri
January 23, 2023
Summary
Two months ago, she launched the Girls Make Games Scholarship Fund, a charity to improve access to education for young women looking to have a career in the games industry.
"Girls Make Games [is] a program that exposes girls to video game development and encourages them to explore careers in gaming, but also to use gaming to figure out what they want to do with their lives," Shabir says.
"I'm an economist by training, and a banker [by] experience, but I had no idea how to make games or what the industry was like. When I started making my own game and recruiting teammates for that, that's when I personally felt the pain of recruiting women. And going to conferences and conventions, hearing over and over again that girls don't play games, really brought me down, because I was like, 'I just left my job to do this, and to make educational games for kids, and if only boys are going to play them, I don't know if I want to do this. So, let me see if there is a way to meet the girls and find out why they don't want to play games'."
"That camp changed me, because watching those kids and how they interacted, and the kinds of games that they made Those games don't exist in the marketplace. Those games don't exist anywhere, because these girls are not making them for an audience. They're making them for themselves. The audience is people like themselves, and that's essentially what all art is, right?".
"I've witnessed what it takes for a young girl to go from 'I love video games and I love making princess stories' to, when they get older, 'Why aren't there more games addressing this topic?', 'I wish I could go to college, but it's so expensive,' 'I wish I could find a mentor in the industry who looked like me.' Through these conversations, we were able to figure out what we wanted to do next."
With the Girls Make Games Scholarship Fund, Shabir has the "Very ambitious goal" to reach 100,000 girls and young women within three years, she shares.
Shabir ends our chat by reiterating that Girls Make Games is always looking for more partners to build out mentorship and internship programmers.
Reference
Dealessandri, M. (2023, January 23). Game changers: Laila Shabir, girls make games. GamesIndustry.biz. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from https://www.gamesindustry.biz/game-changers-laila-shabir-girls-make-games