Inequality of gender has been a problem in our society for centuries. It is no surprise that this inequality has carried over to the microchasm of game developers and designers, and while it can be subtle in some instances, it is jarringly obvious in other situations. Take the example of Riot Games getting caught propagating a workplace of gender discrimination, or this week’s example of “Dead Island” and the ‘FeministWhorePurna’ fiasco.  The developer’s space can segmented due to these stereotypes and prejudices in the gaming community itself, making the offices of a game studio a “boys club”. The “FeministWhorePurna” scandal was one such instance where women were treated as the butt of a joke on the internal development team, with this controversial code being hidden inside the game’s program by a coder who must have thought that ‘no one will see this, plus it’s funny to leave in’. What baffles me about this is that there are multiple steps a game must take to be shipped in its final form, yet this line of code was never taken out internally, and was discovered by dataminers. Surely there was more than ONE person who checked the game’s code internally, unless this heinous joke was snuck in secretly by a coder, right? This isn’t the first instance of game designers leaving jokes in their code, as coders of the “Crash Bandicoot” series infamously left dirty names for enemies in the game’s code, knowing that kids would never be able to find these internal names in the code, thus no one would get offended. It was only after several years that dataminers discovered the real names for some of the scientist enemies in the game, with the first game starting with names such as “obj.ass” and “obj.assbanger”, and making the names dirtier as “Crash Bandicoot 2” entered development, with some scientist enemies being named “obj.motherf**ker”. As long as coding jokes aren’t meant to offend, they are fine, but jokes like this, especially in a live service game of the 2010’s, are unacceptable. This mentality of the “boys club” also exists in the world of politics, putting down those who believe in feminism. This can be seen with the “Code is Political” article from this week, as the primarily white, republican, male demographic of the gaming industry puts down the women who create games and programming languages alongside their male counterparts. Truthfully, I believe that equality in the technological workplace is much overdue. Females should be treated with respect, and not as the butt of the joke.