Village Gamer

The second annual ShesConnected Conference, taking place September 29 to 30, 2011 at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre, is expected to include digitally-savvy and influential Canadian women, as well as representatives from top national and international brands and agencies.

“The goal of the ShesConnected Conference is to bring digital women together with brands for networking, educational seminars and interactive forums,” says Donna Marie Antoniadis, co-founder of ShesConnected Multimedia. “The hope is that it’s a start for a long-term working relationship that benefits both the brand and the digital woman.” Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday MacLean’s published an article titled Grand Theft Tax Break, written by Jesse Brown. This article, as you can guess by the title, was a disparaging piece about the tax credits and incentives received by the video game industry in certain regions of Canada.

I am going to overlook for a moment the entire tax incentives debate, mainly because I am not a developer or studio owner and I’m not a policy wonk – there are simply too many areas of the incentives program that I don’t entirely understand, so it’s best to skirt around that issue for now and get to what really got my dander up in that article. I will also overlook the inherent problems within the industry itself, because like any other industry in this country, there are work-life balance issues that need to be dealt with, but they don’t really come fully into play here.

I have to wonder what Mr. Brown has against the game industry, or if he has any friends who work in game development. If that article had been about an ethnic group or any type of visible minority, it never would have been published containing the insults and general slurs it does. It is one thing to be angry about something the industry receives, it is another to wipe a wide brush of insult across those who work in the industry. If the article was in any way meant to be a satirical rebuttal of the New York Times article Mr. Brown uses as reference, in my opinion the author fell far short of his mark. Read the rest of this entry »