In this video essay, Regina Seiwald traces the lineage of women central to the development of the UK games industry, from the 1970s to the present day.
Watch the video below, or find it on YouTube.
Dr Regina Seiwald is a Teaching Fellow in German at the University of Birmingham, UK. After completing her PhD in English at Birmingham City University (BCU) in 2018, she began a two-and-a-half year postdoctoral research fellowship in Media Studies at BCU, where she researched paratexts and Cold War narratives in and of videogames. She is the Science Communication Coordinator for the EU-funded COST-Action GRADE (Grassroots of Digital Europe), editor of (Not) in the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games (with Ed Vollans; De Gruyter, 2023), and author of several articles and chapters on Cold War gaming, videogame history, and digital textuality.
Further Reading
Chess, Shira. 2017. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gitlin, Marty. 2017. Combating Discrimination Against Women in the Gamer Community. New York: Rosen Publishing.
Hicks, Mar. 2018. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Meades, Alan. 2022. Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Meagan, Marie. Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play. New York: DK Publishing.
Shirley, Stephanie. 2012. Let it Go: My Extraordinary Story. London: Penguin.
Teague, Elisa, Peggy Brown, and Nicole Lindroos. 2016. Girls on Games: A Look at the Fairer Side of the Tabletop Industry. Broome: Backroom Incorporated.
Wade, Alex. 2016. Playback: A Genealogy of British Videogames of the 1980s. New York: Bloomsbury.
Women in Games. n.d. Women in Games Manifesto. Available at https://www.womeningames.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Wig_Manifesto23_ID1.pdf.