Elizabeth Reynolds chosen for Criterion Game special open day

Elizabeth Reynolds at the Criterion Game special open day

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Elizabeth Reynolds, 16, from Middleton, was one of the lucky chosen girls to get a place on the Criterion Games Girls4Games open day.

Elizabeth, who is studying for a BTEC in Games Development at Hopwood Hall College, joined 29 other young ladies for an introduction to the disciplines of art, design and coding from Criterion’s own experts.

Video games company Criterion Games (an EA games studio) found that although half of their audience is female, women make up less than 10% of the total job applicants they get.

So, they held a special open day aimed at girls only. They ran an online competition where girls had to answer ‘Why do you want to participate in the open day?’ and then from these applications, they selected 30 girls to discover what life was like inside a development studio.

After a whistle-stop studio tour, the girls learned variety of roles that exist within those disciplines and what kind of study, experience or talents they might work  on to help find success.

In the afternoon, they split the group into teams and challenged them to work together to develop their own game pitch. After being given a random game type, a random image to inspire them and a Criterion mentor to guide things along, the teams had less than two hours to work up a game idea they could present back to a team of judges.

In the short time they had, all of the teams came up with detailed presentations for a wide variety of games. The judges were dazzled by the variety of pitches, which ranged from finding lost puppies, to escaping a witch’s cooking pot, to adventures in a post-apocalyptic world of light and darkness. All the teams won prizes for their ingenuity, and everyone took home a bag of Criterion swag for their trouble.