Vancouver Film School offering Women in Games scholarship

Vancouver Film School will offer its Women In Games Scholarship for the fourth year in a row, which will pay the full tuition for an aspiring female game designer to attend its Game Design program. The scholarship is designed to encourage more women to enter the male-dominated video game industry. Males currently command around 89 percent of the video game workforce in the United States, according to the volunteer respondents from our own Salary Survey last year. Previous recipients of the scholarship (valued at $49,250) include designers who've gone on to work at developers like Microsoft's BigPark studio (Kinect Joy Ride) and Digido Interactive (MotionMaze). Graduates of the program have worked on titles such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dead Rising 2, Prototype 2, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Vancouver Film School will provide application details for the scholarship at its free Game Design Open House on January 22, which takes place during the school's three-day Game Design Expo. The annual conference is open to "game industry professionals, students of game design, and everyone passionate about games." Other companies will also provide information on their respective game industry-supported scholarships for both men and women at Vancouver Film School's open house, including G4TechTV ($7,000), Radical Entertainment ($2,500), Slant Six Games ($2,500), Annex Pro ($2,000), and BigPark ($1,000). "Supporting the growth of women in games is something that I feel strongly about," says Vancouver Film School's Game Design head Dave Warfield. "It benefits the industry to gain new perspectives, creativity, and passion that is reflective of how gaming has changed and expanded in the past 5 years."