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> gamer->modder->hacker path

This doesn't exist today? What about Minecraft mods, or building Redstone circuits? Game modding is as big as it was when I went through that cycle, isn't it?

At least, that's what I plan to show my daughter when she gets a bit older to test her interest.

The path is still there, just not in mainstream titles (at least not as frequently in mainstream titles). If I may point you at my favorite crack, err, game: factorio.

Modding: check. Scientific(ish) concepts: check. Mathematics: check. Encouraging automation: check.

Games are often male dominated and the culture can be toxic.

> male dominated

True, but shouldn't/doesn't matter, especially if the game has no voice chat required (or encouraged by the nature of the game). When I played WoW for a little over a year, the guild I was in had several women. LoL has lots of female players (mostly due to the size of its playerbase), Hearthstone even has a few popular female streamers.

> culture can be toxic

Also true, but most mainstream companies are responsive to feedback about negative players via reporting functionality or something of the like. You deal with negative interactions as a female just by being on social media, games are no different. The main difference is that being a dick to someone is a bannable offence in a lot of mainstream games.

The gaming “culture” ain’t got nothing on Twitter.

Basically, any platform a person can hide behind a screen is going to have toxic people. Gaming is a lot better about keeping the community in check than ANY social media company.

Where are the women game developers creating blockbuster hits for their gender? I am asking in a non-inflammatory way. Same with companies. Break the system and its bonds if it is not serving 50% of the population. Should be tons of opportunity to be had.

Gaming culture isn't really any more toxic than other culture held by people who take the subject of their interests too seriously. Other forms of media also have various unhinged individuals acting like jerks online.

And neither have anything on sports, where the toxicity can go beyond the internet in quite a few situations. For all the comments about toxicity and causing violence, games actually have a pretty good record by comparison.

I'd be inclined to say the gamer->modder->hacker path is generally less accessible in the mainstream today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The above comment made me realize that's effectively the path I followed too, but can today's AAA titles be tinkered with the way Halo PC, Counter Strike, etc could be so thoroughly modified after a few hours poking through forums? I can remember the first time I used the (fan made) halo editing kit to play as an alien on the Silent Cartographer as a crystallizing moment for me to go from a computer user to a computer creator.

I'd say Bethesda games are likely the exception - though from what I remember, trying to mod Fallout 3 mostly previewed to me how frustrating development can be :p

Edit: For what it's worth, I attended the Syracuse University ischool for my bs/ms and while that's also not a computer science program, my classes were usually at least equally proportioned between men and women. So that's at least a personal anecdote that the runway for women entering tech may be improving.

As someone who followed that gamer->modder->hacker path, I would like to see statistics of how many developers got there start that way. The cohort of CS/EE majors I went through college with in 2010 had a solid percentage who started that way, but I don't really see that in the 18 year old CS major of today.

I modded/hacked my school software to get custom CSS themes.

Jeez, War Games was my inspiration too. I saw myself as that clumsy nerd ("Remember you told me to tell you when you're acting rudely and insensitively?" I ask my wife to do that to this day :)

It is true that young males view themselves as modders/hackers in a way that many young females do not. Many reasons for this exist, but the answer can surely only lie in educating this age group to think differently. I don't hold out much hope that Hollywood will respond with a gender volte face.

As far as I know there is no lack of female hackers in movies nor of creative girls and women in real life. Take the electronics/maker scene. Even though there is even less women in EE/ME than software (which is quite the feat in itself) I can think of at least half a dozen public women in what little scene there is. Software culture is much more subjective and largely based on things that doesn't exists anymore. And even if it did it would to a large extent have been created by and for men. If we want more women in software culture it has to be about making cool things and not about fitting into stereotypes.

Did you see the iron Man trilogy?

What you said is how I felt about those movies.. each time they produced material that could encourage the next generation

I've been meaning to do a long form on the subject

iM1: science as sexy then "in a cave, with a box of scraps"

iM2: discover a new element

iM3: hack hardware, hack the genome

Great thoughts.