MYSG Women in Games

Sometime back in February, Gwen & Cheryll attended the very first local Women in Games meetup organised by the Facebook group, MYSG Women in Games! A bit of history:

Mayling giving a talk at Level Up KL 2017 (Photo: Yan Marchal) 

It all started when Mayling, formerly from EA Motive at that time, was coming down to give a game design talk at LevelUPKL 2017! As a Malaysian-born game developer, she was curious about what's going on for women in the local games industry, hence starting the Facebook group originally meant for women in games Malaysia to join and organise face-to-face meetups. Her drive to create a safe space for women to discuss industry issues was new and refreshing for many local industry folks, inspired by other women in games initiatives in Montreal, where she was based at during that time.

Meanwhile sometime in 2017, Gwen and Natalie Mello, a fellow gamedev from Singapore decided to take a train up to KL and attend IGDA Malaysia's gamedev community meetup. Another really wonderful woman Anisa Sanusi who works in Hutch, also Malaysian-born, was giving a talk about UX in games. While chit-chatting after her talk, we collectively decided to hang out with the women developers at that meet up and have an impromptu gathering on the spot!

From left: Anisa, Gwen, Natalie, Hafiz

Remembering that we have the Facebook group, we had our very first cross-country MYSG gathering at LevelUpKL 2017!

MYSG WIG lunch at Level Up KL 2017

MYSG WIG dinner at Level Up KL 2017

Since then, we've been using the group to organise our yearly LevelUpKL meetups, with the most recent one in 2018.

MYSG WIG Meetup at Level Up KL 2018, with Yasmin Mahmood, former Director of MDEC

- END OF HISTORY-

Moving forward back in Singapore, Gwen met up with Sadia Rahman, who's working in Facebook and organised the WIG Facebook Meetup in Singapore very recently. With her encouragement, we've decided to hold monthly WIG meetups for Singaporean game developers! Our first meetup was spent chit-chatting and deciding what to do for subsequent meetups. Somebody suggested "D&D! (Dungeons & Dragons)" which was met with collective, enthusiastic nods.

SG WIG very first meetup!

Since then, SG WIG meetups have all been about tabletop role-playing games, which is super cool since it's a safe space and we can truly roleplay as who we want to be!

SG WIG 2nd meetup! 

Meanwhile, other amazing things have been brewing with our Malaysian neighbours - Lee Ying Foo (artist for SIMULACRA) and her team also subsequently began to run their own monthly meetups WIGout in the form of sharing sessions and talks!

WIGout, a women in games initiative in Malaysia. 

It's just amazing how 2 different countries were brought together, then inspired each other to start their own initiatives. As differently as we run, the goal is always the same - celebrate our women in the industry, support each other and have fun together!

Game creators who are or identify as women and are based in Singapore/Malaysia, please feel free to join MYSG Women in Games.