UCF’s Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy will host an inaugural “Press Play” conference on Saturday, bringing together students and speakers focused on bridging the gender gap in the gaming industry.
The graduate video game school is teaming with industry leader Electronic Arts to present the conference. More than 250 mostly female high school and college students and their parents are expected to attend the event – themed “Girls & Games” – at FIEA, which is located within the University of Central Florida Center for Emerging Media in downtown Orlando.
The young women will learn what it takes to bring video games to life alongside industry professionals from EA’s Orlando studio, EA Tiburon, and FIEA during hands-on workshops and panel presentations on motion capture, software engineering, music composition and more. It’s a particularly timely theme, given recent attention given to a gender gap among high-tech companies.
The keynote speaker, Sigurlína Ingvarsdóttir, is a senior producer on Electronic Arts’ FIFA, the biggest selling AAA game in 2016. Previously she spent four years at DICE in Stockholm where she helmed the Star Wars Battlefront franchise, launching the massively successful Star Wars Battlefront in 2015 and establishing the foundation for Star Wars Battlefront II.
For more information about the conference, visit https://fiea.ucf.edu/pressplay/.