January 18, 2017

Jess Joho ’14 has always loved video games, but she’s pushing them—and the people who play, make, and talk about them—to be more inclusive.

    At best, the gaming community is ambivalent about women. At worst, it’s vitriolic. Joho told me a story about an industry magazine that recently did an “open call” for female writers; they were shocked when not one applied. “But if you look at their website,” she said, “It literally says ‘for men, about men, doing men things.’ Let’s start there.”

    Joho never considered video games as more than a hobby until she took “Women and Girls,” a design lab taught by former Bennington president Liz Coleman and faculty member Susie Ibarra. In that class Joho saw the opportunity games offered and how the medium she loved might be able to give male gamers a way to empathize with, not sexualize or brutalize, women.

    “Video games let you embody someone else. You say ‘I’ when playing as someone with different characteristics,” she explains. “I thought, imagine if instead of keeping the experience of women and girls at a distance in games, you could tell women’s stories to [gamers], who are mostly boys and men.”

    Now, as an associate editor for a major gaming magazine, Kill Screen, she found a unique space for gamer-critics and activists who have substantial and intelligent criticisms, as well as a passion for the very industry they’re critiquing.

    “Being a critic is like being an evangelist that’s perpetually dissatisfied,” she explained. “An evangelist that expects more.”

    Unlike the company she earlier cited, “Kill Screen doesn’t put the onus on women to come to an unwelcoming space. They have a path to make sure women are included in the conversation. They’re not waiting around for talented women to take risks in a male world.”

    How do they do it? A robust internship program that actively recruits diverse, underrepresented voices, one Joho herself benefited from as an intern in 2014, during her final Field Work Term. Since then she has worked her way up to staff writer, editor, and manager of the internship program—a role she invests in by providing deep attention and coaching to interns, by helping them to develop their writing, to hone their voice and use it confidently. She is not just paying her experience forward, she’s continuing to pave a path for other women and underrepresented voices in the industry.

    It is this kind of training pipeline that has also helped the company grow “from me and four other dudes to 60-plus writers,” many of them women, who are increasingly non-white, and non-American. “It’s the most diverse virtual workspace I’ve ever seen in games.”

    Kill Screen states that their mission is to show the world why games matter. “In order to do that,” Joho reasoned, “you can’t say games only matter to some subset of the population.”

    The safe and galvanizing community she has helped build—both off-screen and behind the scenes—doesn’t shield her from hate, she reminds me. There’s still the Internet. There’s still misogynistic, violent Twitter and Reddit threads. The difference now is she knows they do not speak for everyone.

    “Men might say they don’t want to hear women’s voices in games, but my readership says otherwise.”