GameMentorOnline Announced

The other day I blogged a lament about the status of women in the games industry. In yesterday’s IDGA newsletter they announced the GameMentorOnline initiative:

GameMentorOnline

GameMentorOnline

IGDA Women in Games, in partnership with Women in Games International, is presenting GameMentorOnline, the first-of-its-kind online mentorship program for the international games industry.

GameMentorOnline is generously supported by title sponsor Microsoft Game Studios, with additional support from premier sponsors Design, Direct, Deliver and Sony Online Entertainment. Designed to serve students and young professionals, men and women alike, GameMentorOnline has been developed to meet the growing need for peer-to-peer mentorship support in games.

As our industry expands, contracts and evolves, there is a continually pressing need to shepherd and educate new talent, while tapping into the significant knowledge and resources of a growing community of advanced game professionals whose expertise could be lost if not passed on to new generations of game industry employees.

GameMentorOnline is a free service, open to mentors and protégés of all types and in all disciplines of games business and development. GameMentorOnline is powered by a turn-key mentorship matching solution that enables multiple options for protégés when selecting their mentor of choice. GameMentorOnline has been created with a purpose in mind, to carry the mentorship relationship through key milestones to an eventual outcome.

The biggest challenge for GameMentorOnline and any similar program is the ability to attract and maintain committed mentors. We are asking all experienced members of the game trade to consider dedicating themselves to a minimum of one protégé relationship per year. By meeting this goal, we all contribute to strengthening the games industry as a whole, and giving back to a community that needs our support.

There are two PDFs of interest:

• becoming a mentor
• becoming a protégé

And a bit of what it entails:

The mentoring program is a semi-formal eight month program where you exchange weekly emails with a protégé. The estimated time commitment is about 15 minutes a week, but the benefits of sharing your knowledge with a protégé will last much longer!