Last fall, Meghan Morgan Juinio (’94) came back to Madison to do something she’s rarely done before: stand on a stage and tell her story in front of a packed room of videogame developers. More than 700 of them, in fact.
Morgan Juinio is the director of product development for Santa Monica Studio (SMS), the California-based game developer that produced, among other things, the uber-popular “God of War” series on Sony PlayStation. That made her an ideal keynote speaker at the 2024 Midwest Game Developers Conference (MDEV).
The gig gave her the opportunity to provide a perspective that isn’t often showcased. The multi-billion-dollar videogame industry has experienced both unprecedented growth and difficult challenges, including battling long-standing issues with misogyny and sexism. A 2021 survey put the number of women in the industry at 30%, up 10% over the previous four-year period.
But as Morgan Juinio can attest, the number of female game development executives is significantly smaller. She didn’t encounter a female studio head until she’d been in the industry for more than six years, when she worked on now-defunct publisher THQ’s “WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw” franchise beginning in 2007. She found another female mentor when she joined SMS 11 years later.
“I’ve been on lots of projects and teams where I’m the only woman at the table or where I’m brought in because there’s need for another perspective,” she says. “And I’ve jumped at those opportunities, because I feel that diversity is what makes us better, but it’s taken a lot of perseverance. I’ve had to learn how to function as a woman in the video games industry.”
As part of the SMS leadership team, Morgan Juinio’s job is realizing the game director’s vision, making sure the internal development team has everything it needs to get the game out the door. Her responsibilities include team management, project management and maintaining studio culture.
The skills she has developed in these tasks are what’s moved her up the leadership ladder. But language is what opened the doors.
Morgan Juinio had always loved languages, starting with Spanish as a fifth grader in Milwaukee. But a disappointing experience with a teacher in eighth grade sent her in search of a different option in high school — Japanese. Morgan Juinio quickly leaned in, becoming the only girl in a group of students who won an essay contest held by Wisconsin-based Kikkoman Soy Sauce. Her prize? A 10-day tour of Japan.
“It was this brilliant life choice that ended up changing the entire trajectory of my life,” she says. “I realized, this language I’m learning is a tool. It’s a key that’s going to help unlock access to this whole other world that exists outside of Wisconsin.”
I realized, this language I’m learning is a tool. It’s a key that’s going to help unlock access to this whole other world.
Morgan Juinio chose UW–Madison for her undergraduate experience, pairing a program in Japanese language and literature with a double major in political science and international relations, focusing on East Asia. Her language skills are what landed Morgan Juinio her first job in film-based computer graphics, working with Square USA on the 2001 CGI film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It was also her entrée into the video game industry, working for Konami Digital Entertainment at a newly constructed studio in Hawaii. Half of her team were non-English speakers from the games industry in Japan, and the other half were from the computer graphics and film industry in Hollywood. Morgan Juinio’s challenge was to help bridge the cultural gap.
“Even though I didn’t have the development experience, I had the language skills, and I kind of had that cultural experience of living in Japan for a while before coming to Hawaii,” she recalls. “That was my opportunity. That was my foot in the door.”
Now, with multiple decades of experience in video-game development, Morgan Juinio is working to open that door for the next generation of girls. She has partnered with a Los Angeles-based group called Project Scientist, creating a week-long summer camp experience that introduces girls to video game design and walks them through the fundamentals of creating their own game. Female developers, including animators, engineers, artists, designers and writers from SMS, have given attendees a sense of the broad range of opportunities in the industry. Morgan Juinio also took advantage of the little-known fact that Brownies and Girl Scouts can earn a video game development patch. She helped members of LA-based troops earn one and has partnered with the group Girls Make Games as a judge of the demo games created through their summer camp program.
“What’s important to me is, how do we get more girls into the video game industry?” she asks. “How do we also get the women who are already in the industry seeing themselves in leadership and decision-making positions? The more that we can create pathways and opportunities for women to be in decision-making positions over the content, then the type of content that we’re going to get is just going to get broader and broader and hopefully more appealing to a larger swath of people.”
Before delivering her keynote at MDEV, Morgan Juinio workshopped it with a few female friends in the industry. One of them suggested she spike the word “relentless” because, for women, it can sometimes be seen as negative.
“I thought, I’m leaving it in. I can use the word as it applies to my own career growth and development,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons why I accepted the invitation to come back to Madison, to just stand up there and say, ‘I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have everything figured out, but this is my journey. This is my story, and here I am.’”
