Ask Me Anything: Q&A with Global Game Jam's Kate Edwards

[Music] hello and welcome to gdc 21 this is our live ama q a with global game jams kate edwards that was a lot of letters all at once i'm joking shore editor-in-chief of indie games plus i'll be the moderator for this session my pronouns are he him and i am ridiculously excited to announce kate edwards have you got a ton of questions for her mr brock yeah absolutely thank you so much for having me here it's great um as a long time participant in gdc um this is a little bit different from what i used to but that's great so um absolutely and let's let's get moving on this very cool so i'm going to jump right in before anybody else has any questions because i'm lucky and i can do that what first interested you in bringing your geographer experience to be into video games because that's that sounds really interesting to me

yeah that was that was really kind of a mistake a happy mistake because i you know like many people in my generation who are you know above 50 or in our you know up there uh more veteran status i guess um we didn't game design and game you know creating games there's not really a clear career path you know coming out of high school or in the college days so for me i basically pursued what i was interested in which was you know wanting to be an astronaut wanting to be an artist for lucasfilm because i want to work on star wars and then eventually settled on geography and cartography because i've always had this incredible interest in cultures and travel and maps and everything and plus the artistic artistic skill i had i could use with cartography and so basically to make a really long story short i pursued that field and i'm really happy i did it's been fantastic and i ended up doing my graduate school work at the university of washington in seattle and i just finished my master's degree

which was focused on using vr for cartography that was way back in 1991 and microsoft called our department and said they needed a cartographer to work on encarta encyclopedia which some people out there might remember and so i went over to microsoft on what i thought was going to be like a really short term contract uh to work be a cartographer and you know basically help uh create the maps for the initial version of encarta well that turned into a longer and longer contracts and eventually a full-time position and i um in that full-time role which was still initially mainly focused on the cartography in like in carter world atlas and card encyclopedia streets and trips like all the mapping products that microsoft was doing i did um get asked by the flight sim team at one point they're like hey you know you're you're a cartographer we need some help with some advice on this um but where it really started for me when i really started working on games was i created an internal team at

microsoft called geopolitical strategy because i noticed that the company was having struggles with maintaining knowledge around like what is sensitive from a political standpoint or cultural standpoint um in the content that they were producing and so like you know the office team would make a mistake in one market and then you know another product group who does you know completely across the company would make a similar mistake and then they'd get in all this really big trouble with the government because you know they were making these mistakes and so i basically determined that this is a weakness and so there needs to be a group that coordinates that kind of knowledge across the company so once i created that team that was way back in 1998 um that also gave me the mandate to work on all microsoft products including all the games so i started working on all the pc uh stuff back then like all the age of empires and you know asheron's call and all those kinds of games mechwarrior and then of course we got into the early xbox um you know because xbox that

initially wasn't there yet um but then i and it got to basically work on all of those microsoft franchises um halo you know obviously uh fable forza all of that stuff and that's when i really found like this is my calling i get to do what i call culturalization work on video games so it's basically this incredible confluence of everything i love technology creative media games uh geography cartography all of this stuff can came together in a really strange way and i'm so thankful that it did and uh i love what i do yeah it sounds like it's really interesting work and it works too well to all your interests um and if the audience has any questions feel free to jump in throw those in the chat otherwise i'm just going to keep taking over the whole talk because i'm super i want to keep pushing forward can you tell us some of the do you have some interesting stories on your work with like halo or call of duty or any of those oh yeah there's there's a lot of stories i mean probably

one that's um that has become i've used this in some of my lectures is one that um that caused a lot of uh problems as we had one game that probably a lot of people have never heard of or don't remember called kakuru chojin which was on the original xbox it was like a hand-to-hand fighting game and the problem is that the game included a initially included an audio file that had uh chanting from the quran so it was you know remember this yeah so it was yeah no exactly so it was chanting lyrics from the quran which they you know basically that's probably that's not appropriate to have in a game in that kind of context and so you know when i raised the concern it was it was brought to me um and then i verified it with someone who was uh who was in my building who is actually originally from kurdistan and so he's like yeah he's like this is going to be a big problem yeah i figured that so um basically the decision was made to fix it right away but the problem was

that we already had actual copies of the game already printed and literally rolling on their way to stores and so the challenge then is like what are we supposed to do with all those copies that are out there and of course my decision was just destroy them i mean recall them and just you know we'll make new ones because for a company like microsoft it's not that expensive you know to redo that but the decision was made to go ahead and release only the us because the feeling was that it should not be a big issue even though as a geographer i'm like did you know that there's you know eight or nine million muslims united states did you know that like detroit's 50 muslim it's like we are not a homogeneous society here so there are people in this country who are going to be you know who are going to notice this and i was told don't worry about it so basically you know and the decision was kind of a convoluted decision i'm not going to go into how that was made but basically um we eventually got a because the game did

release um we did get a a letter from the government of saudi arabia that basically was telling us that this was a huge problem and it became front page news in the middle east um really rapidly it really started to explode in the region as a as a negative piece of news and so i eventually was asked by the head of the middle east region of microsoft to come over there and basically help do damage control because i as a geographer and in the role i served uh in microsoft i knew you know the complex issues behind it and why this is going to be sensitive so they said it'd be great if somebody from headquarters like you could come over and actually explain what's going on and what happened and so i did and i ended up going to riyadh and i landed in riyadh two days before the second gulf war started so that was exciting so exciting is a word for it you know and i didn't really i wasn't really thinking about it obviously i was aware of what was going on in the world but at the same time i'm like well that's my job i need to go there and do

this and um so what was fascinating is that you know i sat in front of representatives of the religious council of the of the saudi government to explain to them what happened and it was um to say it was a bit uncomfortable is an understatement but basically i did to shorten the story you know that i basically explained to them what happened and you know they they accepted the the apology and then we just moved on then i went over to dubai and had to do something similar even though you know the uae is a more liberal culture within within the region so it wasn't quite as stringent there but the point being is that one audiophile that somebody did not check that nobody asked like what are these lyrics what where was this from all because of that the game the game eventually was globally recalled um because it just was so caustic it created so such negative pr and um yeah it was unfortunate it actually showed up on ebay for a while like hey banned video game you know

actually the price was was uh fairly high at one point but then of course it immediately dropped but so that was that was just one example of many many kinds of challenges in this space that you have to deal with because you know choices have consequences and we have to be super careful about where we're you know putting in games even though you know the developers said well we put it in there because it sounds cool and i agree it does sound cool it's a beautiful lyrics it's a beautiful music to listen to but the context is just not appropriate yeah you definitely have to keep these things in mind and it's good that there's folks like you are working to kind of like be at the forefront of this stuff um how do you stay up to date on uh what's going on in the world for your culturalization work uh in the chat that is a great question what i do is i read a lot of stuff i also have a lot of uh search alerts that i've set up that are like customized um that basically inform me on a daily or weekly basis so i'm basically constantly getting stuff in my inbox um based on

searches that i created around topics that i that i need to know about um you know in this space um i also have a an extensive network of people i've i know you know just from all the travels i've done people whose opinions i i trust um and i know basically where they're coming from so i can ask them you know if there's something going on in a specific market i can you know just you know chat them up and say hey you know what's going on with this what do you what what's your perception of what this means um things like that so it's it's really a combination of things i mean i also i read academic journals i read the economist i read a lot of news um out there to basically stay informed of what's going on because one thing that's really important about the job it's not just knowing like the specific sensitivity around a specific piece of content like a for example a symbol that some person an artist put on a character's you know outfit things like that that's kind of the baseline knowledge that i constantly try and build up i for example like symbols alone i have

a stack of books that's at least a meter high of all these simple dictionaries that i yeah and i'll kind of browse those for fun because that's kind of the nerd that i am um because i just i find it fascinating but um so there's kind of that combination of kind of the baseline knowledge of of certain cultures that has been built up and a lot of that is on the foundation of my geographer um training and that background but the other part of it is understanding the current market conditions which is why i keep up on the news and what's going on in the world because i need to know that when this game is supposed to release let's say third quarter 2022 i need to have a sense of what is the market condition to be like then because you never know i mean in some places all it takes is as we know could take one election and things change i mean you know in certain markets i mean laws can change the whole you know what is acceptable unacceptable could suddenly change i mean all of that kind of stuff um can change depending on or just even the general perception of video games

might change either more favorably or less favorably depending on what happens uh in that particular market so that's kind of stuff i also have to keep track of so um so yeah that's basically how i do it it's just a huge combination of things of reading and staying up on all the the searches and whatnot but also talking to people that's really the best way to do it is just having a network of people who you can talk to about what's happening in their locale it sounds like a great deal of work on top of all the other work you already do it is a lot of work it's a lot of work but the thing is i love doing it though i love what i do i'm just this hyper curious person so i just i love absorbing information um you know and it's it's the best way of all is just talking to people from other cultures that's why i feel really thankful that um over the last many years i've been able to travel a lot when there's no pandemics so typically i'm traveling like 75 80 percent of the year speaking at a lot of conferences around the world

um but that gives that opportunity to you know talk to people face to face and learn more about their perspective on things and you know what they're struggling with as game developers and you know the issues that they're dealing with so that all all of that informs my work you find a lot of studios are very open to the work you're you're doing uh today yes um when i first started doing this work which was you know during my microsoft days that was over 27 years ago um i basically peg it that far back so back in those days it was challenging it was a challenge because the the prevailing attitude of the time was like hey video games we're edgy we're cool we can do stuff that's controversial um and yeah sure i mean that but that's any creative media it's not just games it's like yeah you have the creative right and you should exercise that right to basically make what you want to make but you know it's it's all about you know whether or not that is really going to be compatible with um with the local world views and

the local you know expectations that you're going into so um so yeah it's it's it's it's but today it's gotten a lot easier obviously society has changed dramatically over the last 27 years on the level of understanding i think has increased especially among companies who understand that representation matters it really matters and you need to make the effort to to go the distance so to speak in terms of making sure that your characters your narrative your environment all of these things are accurate and respectful of the cultures that you're going to be leveraging even in a fantasy game you know it matters there obviously because most fantasy and sci-fi games also get their inspiration from the real world pretty much every game does by in some aspect and so we have to make sure that the representation is you know is we're really concentrating on that so i find today and especially this this punctuated within the last couple years

or so i find that a lot of companies have suddenly woken up to the idea that this is really important um and there's various social issues and you know look recent events that have caused them to be more you know aware of how important this really is and part of me is grateful for that but also part of me is a bit resentful because i'm like it should not have taken you this long to get it you should you should have you should have just you know thought this way early on because honestly when i first started doing this work the argument i originally used was that we're doing this because we want to respect the player we want to respect who they are as a human being and make sure that that's we're representing them correctly in our games and making sure we're respectful within the narratives that we're pushing out that argument didn't go very far back then so i had to pivot my argument and make it a money argument so that's why i had to say well you know if you culturalize your content it actually maximizes the reach of your content

because then it can go in more places around the world and so therefore if you you know that's if you culturalize make sure it's more compatible with other markets that does happen to increase your revenue and that argument resonated really strongly especially with the higher ups in different companies and so i'm like okay great i found the key that opens up the door but at the same time i was like i should not have had to make a money argument to make this important to people yeah it's heartening to hear that things are getting better now but it's like you say it's it's disappointing that it took this long to kind of get to this point um you for staying kind of fluid with uh how you pushed to get this this stuff to happen though those people come to you and you definitely hadn't i told you so that i bet you were holding your back good i try not to say i told you so but it it happens sometimes it's too i told you this you're stronger than me then it's too good to pass up sometimes all right we've got another question in

the chat um how do you make sure that you respectfully handle cultural assets and games and how do you grow your own economic grow your own expertise and these cultures that aren't your own part of the answer but yeah i i answered a little bit of that but that this question's a little more specific and i think it's a it's a great question because i think there there's a certain understanding and awareness i have of various cultures around the world just by the longevity of the time i've been doing this work because again reading a lot talking to a lot of people having an understanding of like kind of the baseline reaction that some cultures would have but i'm obviously i'm not presumptuous to think that i'm going to represent the voice of a specific culture so my job when i'm doing it is basically to flag something and say i think this is going to be a problem in this culture based on my understanding but the then they need to take the next step and sometimes they facilitate that through me and my work but then oftentimes they i help them facilitate it through you know by themselves but basically you need to find someone from that culture

an expert a sensitivity reader you know some person who's going to represent that culture and be able to speak to the issues that you're addressing here because that's ultimately how you have to do it you have to consult with them and obviously we've seen games do a better job of this over the last few years you know there's great examples like for example some games that have indigenous characters like i think what assassin's creed 3 which then brought in someone from the cherokee nation to directly advise on how you know the connor character should be represented with the language they use all of that kind of thing i did a little bit of consulting work on never alone for example which was the game developed in direct partnership with the inuit people up in you know northern canada which was you know and basically they were the ones dictating to the development team this is what how it should be done this is the language this is the look you know and i think that when you're when you make a game that is based on real cultures um and real geography you really have to have that kind of direct engagement to me that's really the only

best way to do it because my knowledge i can definitely flag things and i can make people aware that you know they're going down a path that could be potentially problematic but you know i i like everybody else i've got my limits to my knowledge basically i hit that wall and that's when i know either i need to reach out and talk to somebody locally or i need to get the company to do the same you know or even take another step which is like do specific sets of user research or focus groups with that with a particular culture so that they can make sure they're not walking down a the wrong path you know with their creative uh choices are you seeing any sort of common mistakes between uh developers that can be fixed with this expertise yeah there's a lot i mean even though i do see companies that are more aware today than they were even five years ago we still see tons of stereotype issues lots and lots of stereotyping going on um to me that that's a combination of just you know part of its creative laziness frankly uh

it's not doing your due diligence if you're gonna create a character that's not from the culture that you represent you know then you need to do your due diligence to make sure you're making a character that is realistic to that culture and not no not leveraging any tropes that are out there around that particular culture it's really easy to do because it's something of a creative trap you know that we we make these assumptions and this it speaks to the fact that every single one of us whether we like it or not we are biased i mean because we all come from a specific culture specific language specific geography and you know i think most of us we overcome that bias with education that's what the benefits of of having educational process but that doesn't mean that all of those biases we might have or just and i'm when i say bias i'm not talking about like active bias like i'm actually thinking about doing something that's going to be you know problematic i'm just thinking i'm just saying that the bias is there because that blocks us from having that full understanding of what other choices might be if you're going to make us like

a specific character say a character from east asia you know what are my choices there well east asian culture is is dramatically diverse would you look at you know china korea japan you know other places throughout the region and even within those countries it's quite diverse you really have to dig deep and understand you know what what do you want what do you want to represent in that from that particular culture um and again speaking to the point about um about uh fantasy and sci-fi games sometimes game developers because a lot of our games tend to be set in a fictional universe we also have to be really careful because those things bleed over all the time those choices are also just as complicated because we often look to the real world to set up allegories in our sci-fi or fantasy universe whether it's narrative allegory or visual allegory um but those allegories have an origin point they have an inspiration in the real world and we need to make sure

that we have sufficient what i call allegorical distance so that the original inspiration isn't too obvious to what actually shows up in the game um so i think that was a long answer sorry it was a really good answer because i feel like covering a lot of important points that many of us without even realizing it carry these little biases these little things we don't maybe we didn't picked up on that we we feel or terms of phrase we use or like you say the the the inspirations for some of these character styles or types or things like that in our fantasy mediums and things like that really looked at so to your point it's very important to kind of examine these things before we kind of plot out something harmful again without thinking about it yeah all right we got another question here from the audience uh how can someone graduating high school or university today best to get their own incredible confluence of everything i love

it's that is a great question i mean part of it like i kind of alluded to earlier for in my case was a happy accident but but the point is though i never lost track of what i love you know i always had that that uh i kind of wear my interest on my sleeve so to speak so like my my love of star wars never went away it's like i you know my because i that's why i wanted to be an artist at lucasfilm just so i could work on a star wars movie that was the whole reason and of course i didn't get that chance but i did years later i did work on star wars the old republic for bioware for four years so you know in that case the circle was now complete i actually got to work on something star wars not in the same capacity i imagined when i was in high school but i still got to work on it so that's one of those just serendipitous things about your life path and career that i always find interesting is that you have no idea whether or not these things are going to come back along your path at some point in the future um you know it is important to kind of

choose a path because you got to be on a path that's the important part you gotta be going in a direction but you have to be open to how that could change and and you know i i do mentor a lot of people in this industry a lot of young people who want to come into this industry and one of the the biggest challenges i find but i think it's also natural with that age is that you have you're very focused on exactly what you want to achieve i want to be the chief designer on x franchise for example i want to be the lead designer at this company that's great and i think people should have specific goals like that but you got to be really open and flexible to other stuff that comes your way um because i i never imagined when i was in high school being a geographer i never imagined working on video games even though i love video games i was seven years old when pong showed up in the store so that was my first video game and i've loved games ever since but um i never imagined any of this happening at all it was not ever even

close on my radar and yet it was mainly because as the choices came along i was open to the idea that like okay yeah i want to do that i want to do this like i you know i left microsoft in 2005 even though i had built my own team there i created my own job there i was getting paid very well with good benefits and all of that but i left because it just i felt like my job was done there i had done basically what i needed to do with the company and now i wanted to see if other companies want to do this too and i wanted to also focus almost exclusively on games which is another reason i left because then it would give me the ability as a self-employed person to focus on what i wanted to focus on and a lot of people thought i was insane why would i possibly leave a good job like that that i created at a company like microsoft and go off and become you know an entrepreneur which is you know almost a death sentence for some and but it was because i just had that driving desire

to to take my knowledge and do something different with it and so i think you have to take be willing to take risks like that and be willing to be open to whatever comes along your way and don't be afraid you know if you have a great opportunity that comes your way that might be a little divergent from the path you were imagining i would encourage you to take it because you never know how that's going to come back and the reality is that everything you do no matter what job it is no matter what path you're taking you are building up experience life experience and work experience that ultimately could be useful down the road so i just encourage you to just keep your eyes open you know because some too many people get blinded by this you like this really solid focus yeah you get too focused on one thing so it's kind of like allowing yourself to broaden that experience yeah see you all right probably comfortable one more question of course it slipped on down the list how dare you sneak off on me all right

um we're actually going to touch on some of your global game jam stuff now because yeah i'm talking about this globalization tough a lot of solo game dev struggle with matchmaking and forming teams a lot of people use game jams as a platform for this many of these teams collapse after the event experience global game jam um is there a way to provide help to game devs and find the right people to work with that is a fantastic question that is something that we're trying to work on because we know that that is a real problem and we know that became more punctuated last year because last year was the first time we did a virtual global game jam we did ggj next which is our event for younger people last summer in july that was the first time we ever did a virtual jam and then of course in january this year is when we did a virtual jam as well and well ggg next actually starts in five days this year and again that's a virtual format and that really raised the profile on house what a struggle it is for solo devs to get connected to a team because obviously when you're on

site you're at you're at a location it's a lot easier even though then it can be somewhat challenging for people because there's always that that little part after after the theme is announced and people kind of go their separate ways to you start working on their game you know there's always kind of that little forum where you have the the solo people saying hey i'm you know i can do this you know does anyone need me on their team and usually those people get paired off which is great they get attached to a team but if you're virtual or if you're just kind of out there it's it is tough to do that and so we've been trying to think of ways to make it a lot easier so that we kind of have i don't know i don't want to call it matchmaking not nothing like that but basically a way so that teens can say hey this is what we need and you also have a pool of people to say this is what i do you know to make it a lot easier especially in a virtual jam because that just makes it super challenging because you're not you don't have any like necessary communal space and if you're like in a discord channel or something it's just a lot of noise to

kind of figure out what's going on so the short answer is that we're we're aware of this problem and we're trying to fix it um right now it's it's not an easy fix um but i'm glad you raised the question though all right and i think that's about all we have time for today we're down to that last minute so um kate thank you so so much for coming out and talking with us today it was fascinating to listen to your work uh definitely going to keep following up on what you're doing from here on out well thank you yeah this was great yeah i mean we could talk for hours this subject would take you up on that someday and and i'm more than happy people want to reach out to me i'm pretty easy to find on twitter and elsewhere if you want to reach out to me and if you have additional questions don't hesitate you know especially you know if you're looking to get into the industry this is this is how you start you ask questions and don't be shy all right with that thanks a lot for coming out folks enjoy the rest of gdc 2021

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