17-year-old girl wins Google’s game designing challenge

Few months ago, Google introduced an initiative focused on teenage girls to design games of their own and recently a 17-year-old girl has won that challenge.

Back in December, Google launched its ‘Change the Game’ initiative for empowering teenage girls to design their own games. Now, after all these months, Google announced the winners, rewarding them with numerous delights.

The amazing prizes include an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles, where they’ll tour Google’s LA campus and a scholarship to the ‘Girls Make Games’ Summer Camp. The top winner will also get a chance to share her vision for the future of gaming and have a chance to win a $10,000 college scholarship with a $15,000 scholarship for her school’s technology program, reported Digital Trends.

The winner of this entire grand prize is a 17-year-old girl named Christine. Christine developed a side-scrolling puzzle game in which the user plays role of a shape-shifting girl called ‘Mazu’. Mazu has to solve puzzles to make her way through an unfamiliar terrain.

Apart from Christine, there were other four finalists too including an 8th grader Dakota who designed a series of mini games, ‘EcoVerse’, a 9th grader Lily who designed an all-in-one game ‘The Other Realm’, a 12th grader Erin, who designed a music game ‘Symphony’ and an 11th grader Lauren who designed a game for artists named ‘Palette’.

This competition was launched in partnership with ‘Girls Make Games’, aimed at empowering female developers for all platforms and also the ‘Entertainment Software Association Foundation’, which supports the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) program and encourages kids and young adults to apply STEM concept to real-life scenarios.

Change the Game itself was first launched in 2017 to focus on the under-representation of females in mobile gaming. Google found out that only 27% of the mobile game industry are females or transgender. They also found that 86% of teenage girls play games on a computer, console, or mobile device, while 81% of teenage girls talk about these games with their friends. These stats show that though teenage girls do play games, yet are underrepresented in the industry in general, wrote Tech Juice.

“Our mission is to make mobile gaming truly for everyone by celebrating and empowering women as players and creators. To do this, we’re committed to improving gender diversity in three areas of the mobile gaming world,” says Google on the Change the Game website.