AMA: Diverse Teams

[Music] hey there welcome to this ask me anything session uh we're going to talk about diverse teams today with special guest carl vernado he's chair of black and gaming an educator and uh a regular gdc speaker i think you've been giving talks for five ten fifteen years right about five years yeah i've been at these i've been gc attendees since the 2000s but yeah uh so we're gonna sort of have like a general discussion here for about a half hour we got a chat that's filling up right now folks in chat uh we're gonna ask your questions to carl he's had uh lots of experience in games and has a lot of things to say about it so please just ask whatever questions come to mind especially about you know diversity and game development inclusion upvote questions if you like them and we'll get them over so while we get started carl can you still focus in on sort of what you've been doing in uh your career in games so i got a game

studio in 2003 2007 in chicago my lesson went to the film industry for a couple years and i worked in film industry and i went education so i teach i taught teaching kids how to make games and video games films animation stuff like that and so i've been active in the game industry as an activist i've helped viking games start games in 2005 and been a part of that organization on and off since and then i became the chair in 2014 and so i'm all about getting african-americans more prominent more uh more education more industry access and in the game industry right on i um as you wait to get some questions here i think the first thing jumps to mind is i want to know how you've seen the industry change in this specific regard um you know over the last five years at least like have you seen any significant changes positively or negatively for diversity or for black people same black people and getting specifically represented uh black people have always been in gaming between one to two percent for the last 35 years

like it's that the number has not changed significantly the game industry itself itself has expanded so because the game industry itself is expanded there are more aftermarkets in the game industry but percentage-wise we still hover between the one to two percent dynamic um as far as like access to the industry uh a little better not a whole lot better i would uh i would say companies have struggled to understand how to recruit african-americans in the game industry there are some organizations they can be they could be looking at like destiny national association black engineers they seem to seem like seem unaware of them or going out certainly about colleges and so there's just a lack of like um response to making the teams more diverse in that regard as far as how the industry actually works uh one of the big issues that we've seen is retention uh retaining african-american industry has been a big challenge because of the work environments have not been almost uh not understand not as welcoming as it should be yeah i specifically would love to dig

into that because i think one of the main things i want to get into here is not just getting more black folks black and brown folks into the game industry at all levels but uh keeping them there rather than sort of churning through them i think there's there's still a lot of i mean there's a lot of work to be done in all corners of the industry but especially in um designing uh systems in studios and in companies that keep people feeling included to keep people feeling they're part of the team and sort of just minimize the level of the amount of microaggressions that people who don't fit in with a company culture often deal with on a daily basis um so yeah like how do you think people who work in games specifically like sort of levels of power whether it's you know seniority and such how can they better design game companies and game teams to sort of keep people on the team who have diverse perspectives whether they're black developers brown developers human beings have a tendency right so

like when we we are successful something we think that the vacation of that successful pattern is the way to keep being successful right so like let's say you make a really great a magnificent game and it was 20 of you and your friends in the basement for 15 months and you worked 60 hours a week to do it and you made it right and then it becomes wildly successful right then you're able to get vc money and make it make a company right you think in your mind that the thing you did to make that game successful is the duplicatable thing you should do to make the next game successful right so then you create what's called crunch right you create these ideas that that pattern has to be duplicated again and again to make new games rather than think that was a dysfunctional system that we did in the heat of the moment to make that one game now how do we create a culture that allows that to be sustainable over time right but we don't do it that way we make it a provable model right so then we put everybody else through this system of callousness so that they prove their

worth right and so then that to that particular kind of development then um only search seeks to serve a certain kind of person people in our 20s people that are male because people that are female are not going to work 60 hours a week with somebody but men late at night that's not safe people that are have a certain kind of cultural background right because they can afford to do that and people that are um that that get along in after hours environments right so you start creating this culture of the advantage right because you start to look for people who have exactly the same cultural understanding as you do right and that's not only racial right so then you look for who what's the same school as me who went to the same uh who goes who plays the same games as me who's going to go to a lounge at 11 30 at night and play a game late at night right you start looking at all these cultural connections that you deem as um worthy of being part of a team

right so when then your hr department as you get bigger and bigger your department expands the team when somebody comes in and says this is an odd way to do business you feel offended by their approach right you feel offended that they are now encroaching upon your culture right rather than saying this person may have a different perspective or healthier way of looking at this right for instance the game industry is not welcoming the parents right or because they think you know you have to work all day long but parents might want to take out two and come back at six right because the poor in the time for parents is pick up with kids homework stuff like that so like there's things that you could do as a game industry that could be very very inclusive but you think of it in a way of oh follow my pattern my pattern's correct that way you you create like a self-sustaining and sort of exclusionary system yes and we gotta break that system

a lot of questions in here in chat but now we're going to do that i want to get to some real quick uh right here at the top of the list uh yusuf asks when it comes to portrayal of one's ethnicity in video games how does one who is on the lower level expressed their disapproval of mission representation for example i'm arab and i really dislike being constantly portrayed as a terrorist understandably so uh so he's asking his internally in his company he wants to address a stereotype in the company that he thinks is portrayed not negatively yeah so okay so the way i would think about that would be three ways the first is i would find a bunch of articles that support your point of view right like this is the way i find i require actual stereotypes i find research about how they how that portrays people in the news and i send that that information to my immediate supervisors and say hey i want you to be aware of how this will affect the game to this particular group of people because they can affect uh sales

right the second way is when they go there personally and explain to the hit them their police point of view and explain how it affects them personally right the third way is i support those three others right is to um have a general discussion with the team about why this particular character has to be this particular thing right there are plenty of ethnicities that can be terrorists right why does have to be a muslim and then also flip it like right so is the main character uh standard james bond character and could that be the muslim character right and so then give them another sense of hey why are we looking at let's look the whole scenario on his head like let's make the muslim guy the hero make the other guy the terrorist right and then suddenly that has created interesting interest oh well how do we do that you know they have all these questions that come up right so like kind of go all three so address first the audience issue then address the personal issue and

address the creative issue you address all three otherwise you get pushed back behind your back secretly in my opinion yeah do you think it's important to to make a business case as well or is that is that sort of beyond uh the scope of an individual employee you could make a business case i think it'd be difficult in his position because he said he's a junior person yeah and that might not be his scope of scope of um ability so if so i think he makes it if he says it affects the audience because he can prove that and that's why you show articles like because there's lots of he's got scholarly research you can find that shows negative portrayals of stereotypes in society how they affect people's attitudes toward them and stuff like that once he gets in the business case he's going to balance somebody he's going to balance me from a ivy league school who's going to make another business case while it is important to do it yeah all right well we have another great question here actually a lot of our questions thank you all so much tanya asks how does the diver excuse me how does a diverse team create a successful uh productive and thriving environment

as opposed to a non-diverse team what other advocate what are the ramifications of not striving to have a diverse team uh app well there's lots of okay this is a really complicated question yeah so um i talk about this quite often right so over representations in this industry problem right an old representation is when you have a certain kind of person or wasn't it so much in a team that they think that's normal right so if you have eight white guys on a team and then two ethnic two ethnic guys from a different country and that's your team and you think that's industry standard that's like how it's supposed to work that's how it's supposed to operate right and so then you what you have is then lack of diversity of opinion i got different there's a perspective like a diversity of approach like a diversity of audience like university of live things and so you fit into all these different ideas of we're going to make what we already know and so that often is the problem with

like diverse teams is they're trying to approach a problem from their perspective only their perspective and they become a feeding feeding zone of their own ideas and they can support systems for the ideas they understand right so there's nobody there to come in and say hey what about this what about this idea because that gets a negative reaction because they've now set a standard of what they deem is the best team right and that that standard is a false narrative they don't know if that's the best team but they set the standard of that so that just think i'm sorry right i think um i also like there is uh and this is a preview of gdc summer day three tomorrow king sabrina carmona will be giving a talk about how to cultivate more women in leadership and games yes um and i know there's there's a bit in there where she happens to mention that there have been studies done that show um you know companies that have more diverse leadership teams that have women and uh non-white men uh are like more

successful measurably so 15 to 35 more successful in part because they have a broader range of experiences to draw from and a broader range of perspectives to bring to bear in the market on that note too if you look at undergraduate programs uh minorities i mean marginalized people and women have more larger roles in leadership in undergraduate programs so they usually have more leadership experience coming out of undergraduate schools right the most white guys do even though no one tells you that look golden go if if you call a campus and ask who lives on campus largely they are under the people because they they come there to lead that's part of module that gets school absolutely um before they get away from us let's jump to another question here and chat jasmine asked a little while ago i've heard that many game companies have a boys club vibe would you share your experience with how exclusive these teams are or aren't did you ever not feel welcome yes i've uh there's a couple of things i've been to there's some exclusive kind of um events

that that once you get to a certain level of game industry you go to and i definitely felt targeted at those events sometimes um where somebody's pressing on my credentials or asking why i'm there or um how did you get access to this or you know um this very strange dynamics to have uh the there there is a boys club um and that goes back but i think there's two different kinds because there's a boys club and there's a nerds club which both have their own kind of like weird like rituals to get into right so there's a definitely a boy vibe where like it's locker room talk or whatever that might like but it's also like in the nerve club like you you don't fit into this nerd culture and we're going to make you feel excluded because because we're we're we're supposed to be the people in the industry like this and so i think both of them exclusively do the shout outs from for different kinds of candidates they feel don't belong in those clubs kevin has another good question he asks

thanks for taking questions which that's just nice to share he wants to hear carl your take on job requirements and how job requirements can hinder minority job applicants how can we as applicants better position ourselves in the job market within the games industry oh as the job applicant yeah how do you get around the hr wall all right hr walls are interesting all right so there's a couple of different ways you can do this right so the best advice i ever got for this and i'm gonna give you two pieces of advice really quick the best advice i got this was my one of my friends who works at vico yeah and i was at comic-con one year and we were at camp we had backstage campbell right nice and um she we got you some of the writers for camphill and the guys that and we met were like 25 they couldn't be more fun and i was like super salty because i'm a writer and i'm like how they i can't tell well i was mad about it like it's like seven years ago so um so after drinks were talking and they explained that you know they

took like secretary jobs basically like for like six months right and then once it's a secretary job then they like you know work their way into the writer's room and so when they walked away my friend goes they made the leap and i go what's the leap and they say and she says they took the job they didn't want to get the job they did want and i was like why why would you do that they said she said because then you understand the network he said the people most people make mistakes on is that they don't get into the network first so that they can then appeal to the job they want to do they try to go for the job they want first not knowing anybody and then expecting so then it's all about credentials then right so so she said take your job below you first so like go to find the company you want find three companies you want apply to the job there that is the job that gets you in the door like just you know you want to you want

to work with the company once there spend all your time trying to figure out how to get that job and go to do what you want to do but do the job well do the job super well make you don't be really really good at it and then like immediately when understood find a person that you're talking to because once you're in the club people are more willing to help you so like once you work downstairs and you meet matt in animation right and you have lunch with matt like 20 days in a row matt's going to ask you what do you eventually do and then you're like oh i want to be animator and he's like okay and then matt will tell you at one point hey you're looking for a streamer artist and animation go talk to rachel right and then suddenly you have an opportunity to do that versus saying well being online trying to approach and trying to get the storyboard job online without any any assistance the second way is some companies have exams tests requirements all these different things spend some time researching the company about the processes of what they require to get in

so that means being on linkedin for like six months six weeks many people linked in like hey i want to apply i want to talk to you about coming to blizzard how do i do that you know like and don't hit them like ask people like one question like don't ask more than one like hi my name is ron and i'm a student i'm coming out and i really think liz is a great company what things about blizzard do you think would be great you know like what things about but you want to ask one question and one question only don't waste your time yeah that makes a lot of sense i uh i want to pop over here to one brian francis who asked not a long while ago what are reliable processes for bringing in outside consultants to help talk about cultural identities developers may not know about or not know enough about he's thinking specifically here about folks like the hiro heritage foundation who helped do not make tell me why ask the question again i didn't quite understand it absolutely all he wants to know is what are some good processes for

bringing in outside consultants to teams who can help them uh better represent and portray cultural identities and cultural groups that's a really great question yeah have you had any experience with that kind of stuff as a consultant yourself i've never brought in outside groups for anything i've done but i can i can i say first research who are the experts in that field um and then talk to people that are in those fields and then watch stuff they do and then email the people at the company and once again these looked in and asked them who are the top five groups you recommend me to talk about and then ask those people top five and make us about 15 or 20. like don't stop with the first five you find go to those groups and find who they study and research and talk to right so like there's a network of people that are in each area but all have connections in that so don't stop with the first five like have each person recommend four or five people so you can research them all

and a lot of times you'll find that there's some hidden people in those like people that are really good at research sometimes they're really bad at marketing right so like if you're like gonna think about well i'm gonna go the person has the best website that usually is the person that's best at marketing it right the person that's really good at researching all that stuff is probably like reading a book like they're not gonna they're not on social media right so like you have to kind of do so so do some digging finals i think you're right yeah uh there's been a few questions about games specifically i've tried to keep this mostly to game teams but tony had a good question for a little while ago you want to take a break and talk about which current games do you feel do a good job of portraying uh the realities of diversity and which ones handle that poorly do a good it's a really difficult question to answer um which games do a good job this sets up that's a wide open question games uh there's lots of games that really do a good job of like avatar creation like that's a great way to think about like diversity in some respects

but um the the games that portray cultures like actually portray different cultures there's orion legend of courage which is a great african-based choreography which is a which is really based on african mythology that's a fantastic game um i think we black and gaming gave an award this year um that's a really really good one um there's a there's a i can't think of the name of the game it's the streets of rage clone uh that's really hilarious and beat down city trust you should be trying to beat our city yes alexander allen yeah um uh i love it's a hilarious like game um that momo created it's uh it's about uh uh uh hair slapping it's hilarious like it's uh it's about touching your hair yeah i can't yeah there's there's some really good like um this is good against coming up i know jabari ali is really doing some really cool things with his new game coming out uh that's like doing four months and he's he's really i think i got alpha for it um yeah there's a couple of great ones uh

for triple a studios i mean obviously like uh miles morales is spider-man it's gonna be great like i'm just coming on playstation um um i really like what horizon uh dawn has done with the female protagonist in that game like that's a really good representation thing the issue here though is if you only there's only two percent of the industry and you're not in positions of power in the industry it's something tough because nobody in in decision making capabilities is a person that has the power to say we're going to take these to take these cultural milestones put them in the game so now you're now everybody's in the guy's position to ask question earlier is you're arguing up right so uh if you want better conversation you have to put people in power and position that can then fight for those decisions yeah i mean that kind of calls back to we're talking about earlier about the importance of having diverse leadership teams do you have any sort of contemporary thoughts on how

marginalized folks black folks other folks can get and keep jobs in the higher roles of game development where they can actually exercise that kind of power ooh so my thought would be this um so the first approach to it is to think about all right does this person have capability to to run a team right and that's usually yes right because they wouldn't be in your situation if they weren't capable right the second question then is um do i trust them to run the team right and so if those two are the answer you have when you're in charge that should be the end of your conversation right yeah what happens too often is you look for fit and fit is the easiest way to disqualify minority from a team because it gives people a weird amount of power in decision making without reason right so i can just say i don't really

feel it and not give you a reason why i don't really think it's a good fit and you're what you're saying they're saying is they're uncomfortable with this person being in the role right but that person is going to be uncomfortable because you're now asking them to be in a role they're not used to serving in they're not maybe used to serving this kind of per being this person being in charge of them i'm not used to this kind of person having power over them but i use this person to serve it so there so don't take the fit discussion out of your uh year out of your uh questioning if you believe as the people that are in charge that this person has capability and can do the job that should be the end of the discussion right because you because then you have to tell the team look if you it's not a good fit then you need to move on but imagine and this is something i think i'ma tell the audience real imagine that you're going into position where you're going to supervise people right and they have the power before you get hired and after you get

hired to tell your boss that you're not a good fit and you need to go on that's such a disempowering idea the boss the person in charge hired you to do the job but the people under you have a have a car to play constantly because they have the team to say yeah just not feeling it right and that can't work if you want to be it to succeed you got to give them uh autonomy and yeah i think you're right uh so i kind of want to stay on topic of hiring real quick and maybe sure yeah i i can't it can be for it is frustrating to have people say well we would have more diverse teams if more diverse people would apply because that's bs uh it's on people who hire to hire good diverse candidates but if folks who are hiring maybe really don't know where to look and are having a hard time pat and chad asks can you direct us to a list of resources for hiring for example you mentioned the society of

black engineers knowing some of the best places to reach out or post would be really helpful all right yes all right so once again if you're about programming national society like engineers there's ten thousand members of that there's so you can you can find an engineer somebody who's computer engineering with that group if you want to get more diverse artists right start an art station look at comic-con uh situations look at yeah you know look at people that are trying to do 3d art lots of people that the people that are coming from african americans are this is the first thing to start here okay let's start right here the african-americans who are applying to the game industry are doing so in a way that is against the culture that they come from right it's hard to explain to your parents who invested i don't know how many thousand dollars into your education but you're going to leave not going to banking because you're going to do video games right so this is the person who's already rebelling against the system right

sometimes they're coming from very small um small communities right they don't have a team around them that can do their art and do their music and do all of that stuff there's maybe one or two people coming from that environment right so the first part of that is to understand that you're looking for somebody sometimes that's alone right so your first job is to make them feel welcome to even apply to your initiation they may be intimidated i can't possibly work that um sony i can't possibly forget you have to be encouraging like yeah you can uh senior art is amazing go ahead and apply right like that's the first part second part is get off of the um the berkeley stanford horse like game industry you are enamored with these schools you have to stop if you want to diversify your pool right look at some hbcus down south look at some of the schools across the country there is a lie in the industry that is pervasive

and the pervasive thing in the industry is you have these litmus tests to get into the to get into a company that once they're in they're going to get retrained anyway like what are you doing like if if you don't even need the information to apply to work why is information important when you apply right so if you know if you know a higher manager they're going to retrain them for three months anyway right throw away the the wheel okay what what are you looking for as far as personality we're looking for as far as fit and what i mean fit is are they a nice person to work with are they good to be around what are you looking for as far as like uh outside thought and talent right you know off the idea they have to have a certain amount of so that they can fit your company right like that doesn't matter if you don't even use maya in your company why is my requirement on your website like stop that like just stop it just love maya just yeah because that's what everybody else does it's the right passage right yeah well uh this has been such a good

talk that i forgot to give everyone the five-minute warning so we got about a minute and a half left but as we as they close out i want to try and get to some of the questions we missed there was at least one real quick eve crevice uh a speaker here at ggc summer asked um you know tell me back to what you call like patterns of of culture that sort of homogenize studios and teams she says well you're calling patterns i call cultural myths but you kind of make it sound like hazing is hazing like an appropriate way to think about it some i think there are there can be versions of hazing like i think people sometimes there's people that think you have to go through this so i can you can feel worthy and there's unconscious bias right unconscious bias is hey we do this thing and you don't want to do it so you're not going to be included but they don't they don't they're not doing it to make you feel bad they just like you don't want to they will look at it like you don't want to be included in our in our thing right so we all eat pizza you don't eat you know like i'm i'm a chicago pizza stop i come from chicago

right so i would never eat california pizza like i would think that's like the same right so like if they're going to like this california pizza spot to eat every friday and i'm like on fridays i'm like i would never go to california pizza spot like that's ridiculous so i don't go right and they're like carl doesn't want to bond with us right like that right i just don't care if california pizza doesn't do what you like like but those are things i think that there's like a there's unconscious bias that happens and the bias can over time become exclusive exclusionary right but i also think she's right there are kinds of kinds of hazing where they want you to go through kind of like the same grit they went through to prove yourself and that's wrong that's wrong yeah i think you're right carl thank you so much for joining us today this has been fantastic thank you for having me yeah man all right y'all take it easy enjoy the rest of your gdc and uh have a great evening bye