In the past several years, politics has been on the rise of daily conversation. Almost every topic has been turned into a political issue. With topics being more political, this has transferred into code that developers have created. For many developers however, they can choose to bring their own personal ideas into their work. This is most prevalent with the game Dead Island. Within the game the character Purna gets a boost from killing male characters. This trait for Purna “… has no developed conversation simulation like Fallout or other open-world RPG simulation games, so “unique dialogue options” for a gendered power-up are not relevant. Instead, the Feminist Whore or “Gender Wars” power-up for Purna players confers solely a damage bonus against hostile NPCs gendered as men. The power-up is unique to the Purna character and not available for the other female character, Xian Mei, and “misogynist” power-up equivalents do not exist for male player characters.” (100, Yang On “FeministWhorePurna”) Compared to games like Red Dead Redemption, where these sexists acts are coded into the games, you are still given the choice within those games. Yang arguers that for Dead Island, Purna isn’t given that choice and is simply given the ability which is hard coded into her character.

As coders, we are taught to code ethically and take into account the customer. For example, if we are designing a website, are there any accessibility issues with it? Say the colors of the site, could a color blind person view the site fine? These are things that codes should be taking into account when programming any application. This also goes for checking code to make sure any bugs don’t exist and no errors will occur when the user runs. Again Yang states that “The credits of Dead Island for the Windows platform list thirty-two programmers, not including any engine or tools engineers, and zero game-design roles (which is unusual practice within the industry), but eight level designers and seven writers and thirty-four quality assurance staff. All development staff would have had to validate their changes against the rest of the file; if there was even a single errant line anywhere, it might have caused a parsing error in the game and the script file could be rendered inoperable. Testing staff might have even encountered the “Feminist Whore” text string within the game interface itself, before it was replaced for the public retail version.” (106, Yang On “FeministWhorePurna”) Even with a full staff of developers looking over the code, no one cared to point out this flaw in the code. In many professional companies, code that is developed is reviewed by other developers which is known as a code review. By doing a code review, it not only checks for minor errors in code but any style choices that not in line with the company guidelines. While code reviews can be long and lengthy they are an integral part of keeping each programmer in check with the code they right and to not allow bugs to go through.

Tech companies in the past several years have been making strives to include and hire more women. But what deters many is the fact that it is such a male dominated field. While for some it doesn’t stop them, there is still a “boys club” mentality that lurks within tech companies. This mentality can be harmful in trying to get more women to join the tech work field.