Building a Well-Rounded Party Fireside Chat: Wizards' Everyday Commitment to Representation in Games

[Music] thank you so uh I am very privileged and excited to be here with Cynthia Williams the CEO of wizards we're going to talk about Wizards commitment to community and how that drives accessibility inclusivity in their games and you're probably wondering well who is this other person here so my name is min I love magic raise your hand if you love magic or have played magic okay keep your hands up keep your hands up uh lower your hands if you're not a shitty player okay great then like good company here so I love magic I love magic so much that um I started a magic the Gathering tournament at the dice Summit uh in Vegas many years ago and that's one of the best networking events in my opinion uh that's there um and then I also love d d and I found DND a long time ago and I consider these IPS like really good friends of mine and

I love them I've kind of flexed a little bit because I also love stranger things but to talk a little bit about why I'm here and excited about the talk I came to New York 1984 as an immigrant did not to not have a lot of things that like really look like me um and so my name's mind and I remember going down the you know I-95 and at the stops I'm like I want one of these license plates with Michael and you know Matthew and Mindy maybe if I take Mindy and I scratch off the DUI I might be able to get something for me um so that's more of a personal reason the other is because I work at a studio called bonfire Studios we've been in business for the last seven years and we have been on the Journey of learning of how to be a more diverse and inclusive studio and wizards has actually helped us we've actually called them because they know what they're doing and have given this advice so I'm really excited to be able to talk to you so one thing uh Chris Cox was the previous CEO of wizards and I had the pleasure of getting to know him he's actually come to dice and dungeon mastered at dice

which is incredible this is the first year we did it officially and he's now the CEO of Hasbro and how cool is that for him to fly to Vegas just so he can nudge a master for everything and that's Super Rad um also because it was fun for him I know it's totally fun for him and is he's passionate about it and he loves it your story is that you did not grow up playing Magic and playing DND but Chris really felt like you were the right person for wizards so maybe we can use that to kick off your intro sure tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to join Wizards sure well uh thank you for coming to the conversation today I'm Cynthia Williams this is my second visit to dice I'm sorry second visit to GDC since we were talking about Dice and my first time speaking um I am someone who grew up in rural North Carolina like quite literally surrounded by tobacco fields and woods and most of the people who live there

are families have lived there for generations and they all like lived on the same land pretty much and you didn't leave I most of my friends were discouraged from leaving most of the people I went to school with stayed right there now that wasn't my family my family didn't grow up there my mom and dad felt like the best thing they could do for us is get us an education and encourage us to go pursue our dreams and thank God that was the case because I never felt like I fit in there and that's probably a theme you'll hear throughout this conversation about not feeling like I belonged um now as I look at most of you I suspect most of you make games make games yeah see I don't belong with you either I don't make games but I have been a lifelong gamer and quite frankly my

experience role-playing started in those woods that I grew up in because you know we go traipsing through the woods and pretend we were on adventure or we were looking for Treasure occasionally it'd be a really dark fairy tale version of it but you know I think that's part of what's so cool about role playing is we all started it when we were kids you know whether it was your action figures or your stuffed animals or your friends you were making up stories you know even as kids and somehow along the way people forget how to do that and so I love being in an industry where we encourage people to do that and I think it's important because I think play is a human need I did my first board game was Candyland my first video game was actually I'm going to date myself the handheld pong did anybody have the handheld Punk that's how I started that arcade games I was

pretty good at Pac-Man and centipede and then lots of board games throughout they got a little mature through the years and I played a lot of Scrabble with my mother uh later in life found the joys and the humor of Cards Against Humanity a lot of Monopoly and Scrabble and Pictionary big fan of cranium so um so that all led to me saying well okay what am I going to do with my life what I'm going to do in my career and it turns out I spent about 15 years in the technology industry and what I became great at there was scaling businesses but not in a creepy way like by focusing on the core customer experience and what the customers needed and that was an amazing experience most of that time at Amazon some at Microsoft in the Xbox organization and from there

I started having a conversation with Chris and we've talked about the fact that I don't I knew the games I didn't play the games but I had we had all these ideas for the customers and what we could do for them and the players and the community and it turned out that DNA I learned about how to meet customer needs was part of what he felt like Wizards needed next and certainly as you might imagine he already had aspirations to buy Dungeons and Dragons Beyond and so he knew he needed someone who understood how to have that direct to Consumer relationship as well so that's how I ended up at wizards but I'll tell you the most important part to me after I talked to him saw it was a great business that I met the team and when I met the team I felt like I belonged and that to me is how you choose where you're going to go to work every day

can you can you talk a little bit about entering Wizards and what it's been like because I kind of find that when you go into a company especially like Wizards that have been around for so long with people that have been there for a long time it's like entering a new culture right and they have ways of doing things and things that they value what was that Journey like what did you experience about the people at Wizards and how have you know how how have they impressed upon you kind of some of their values and maybe even vice versa you know I'd say the most important thing I've learned is about the passion of our fans I I had heard about it I knew about it but experiencing it seeing it going to uh the magic 30th Anniversary event in Las Vegas and seeing a sea of people playing Magic that room was so full of joy people were having so much fun you really could understand the impact that this game has in connecting people and then building

their a family that is their found family not not who they were born into but you know who they choose um and so you know that was is probably first and foremost a lot of the values Wizards has are ones I already held so that felt like a pretty natural fit but as I came in and I became to really understand 30 years of Magic the Gathering 50 years of Dungeons and Dragons It's like oh no there's a responsibility here about being a steward for these games and so that's what we focus on a lot is how are we good stewards for the game and for our community awesome so you were talking about these passionate players so maybe before we jump into the rest of the talk you've probably experienced some of the passion recently I have around ogl I have to talk a little bit about that first I am happy to um what were some of the learnings there

and what actually happened you know I think the number one learning was really that or the number the biggest takeaway was we got away from the process that we knew worked we we got away from the process of engaging our community and taking their feedback and then building it into what we were going to do and you know we got it wrong and we really alienated part of our community and maybe a lot of our community but what I'm really committed to is we're going to build back that trust that's going to take time and it's not going to be about words it's going to be about actions and so we're on that Journey now I will say that I don't like how we got where we were but we pivoted we learned from the community and we ended up with a solution where we put the system

reference document into Creative Commons which means that you know you no longer have to trust Wizards to be a creator for d d because it's out of our hands now it's in the hands of Creative Commons and that's exactly where it should be so we're pretty excited about that um I think what's important about Creative Commons is the accessibility it gives to people for actually creating games and that's important because that accessibility leads to Greater diversity of voices which leads to more inclusion it leads to more people feeling like they belong I also think it's important because there's such a Renaissance right now in Indie gaming because everything is lowering the barrier to entry to becoming a game creator awesome which is incredible because it just leads to more voices and so I'm excited that

the same way that you could go into Roblox or Minecraft and and build a game you can pick up a pen and and build a campaign for d d and share it with the world that's awesome okay so um in my former life as a business person in games um obviously I love magic and I kick tires around to see if Hasbro would be willing to share wizards of the cell Wizards of the Coast so I kind of called them out I'm like hey would you be willing to sell this it's like no we wouldn't sell it but I mean how much are we talking and so it was at a time where I think Wizards was kind of like an odd duck in the lineup I think and so I could totally see that but you fast forward to today and I think you would Wizards is probably you know the Evergreen kind of one of the crown jewels of Hasbro and I think they would never sell it to sell it would mean that they would probably sell Hasbro and so uh my question to you there is like what can you give us a sense of scale as to the watsi community like what does that

look like today uh the Waze Community has tens of Millions of fans and players within it and it is one that is increasingly diverse the first time I encountered DND I was a teenager my boyfriend's friends were playing D and D it looked like fun and I asked if I could play and they said no this is not for girls and that's thankfully not the case anymore we have about 50 percent of our d d fans who represent or identify as female and 50 who identify as male so it's gotten to be a really diverse Community we've still got more work to do we've got further to go but we're off to a really good start how do you end up seeing them all so actually like in one of my formula I've said next on obviously I love magic and so I I weaseld my way into Distributing magic

over there it obviously wasn't in Korean it was in English at the time um but like you don't at that time I don't think they saw that far and even talking to uh um uh Rob at our company and he said Warcraft they didn't even know where craft was being played in China but it was being played by so many people so to serve a global Community how do you actually see them like what is they you know it's it's gotten easier with the acquisition of D Beyond because there were when we bought it there were 10 million registered users there's uh we've already said that it's grown by more than 20 percent um we see people when they sign up for organized play on Magic but there is a real opportunity for us to better connect with those players and give them a reason to connect with us so we do a lot of um surveys for Community for insights into the community but I sure would like to have more clarity and

certainty around that the YouTube stuff is probably helping too YouTube stuff definitely helps um I these magic cons help we're going to do one in Europe as well so I think that's that's going to be powerful but we are still too uh U.S and europe-centric like I think there's such a growth opportunity in Asia and we but we've got to figure out the right way to go at that right you know Jewel Masters is huge there but I think we could do a lot more to connect with players there and we saw some of that during neon kamagawa which we'll talk about later so uh obviously Wizards really values Community how does that actually really happen because I mean wizards was kind of one of the first to the community game but internally speaking like what's actually happening in the company that actually drives some of that is how do you

support that yeah we're going to talk about several things I want to talk about internal and then I want to talk about some of our partners as well um you know I talked about what my first experience was like with d d most recently I this is Perks of the job I am playing the some of the heist from keys from the Golden Vault with some of the folks from the DND studio and my DM was the woman who wrote The Heist and there were a couple of other women from the studio there and a couple of men too oh my gosh we had fun can you imagine you get to play with the DM being the person who wrote the high Supreme Court um so part of that is about hiring and how you are intentional about who you're bringing in and who you're interviewing for so we have things like 50 percent of an interview slate so that's the number of people that you're interviewing for a job have to be diverse and if not we're going to keep searching till we find that 50 percent we are some phenomenal ergs employee

resource groups who work with us to give that group a voice within as well so I think there's a number of very intentional things you can do for your internal point of view but for the community I think the most valuable asset that we have is our relationships with the Wizards play Network stores which would be your local game store wherever you're going to play they know their Community best and I one of my favorite things to do when I'm traveling is go see them and talk to the store owners and hear what's working and what's not and how how we could help and then the conversations with them I'll hear things like this one gentleman was talking about how he'd found that their Community had a lot of social anxiety and there were people who wanted to learn to play the games but they were anxious about coming in and playing with the experts because a lot

of you had your hands up as good players too um and so he started Monday night social anxiety lessons so it's like if you have social anxiety and you want to learn how to play Magic come into our store on Monday night we'll we'll teach you and they had a program that was working quite well for them uh other store owners who are in locations where there's a significant lgbtq organ population we'll have events just for them and I think they see our community even better than we can and so our job is to help support them in serving that community I want to talk a bit about d d quickly sure um so how many of you wish you had played d d in school I do I wish I'd played in school so this past year in 2022 we kicked off a school curriculum program for DND and an after-school program and it's been incredible because we've reached nine

million people who didn't know about the game or hadn't played the game through parents and teachers and the kids in fourth through eighth grades and four million of those folks 4 million of that were the students and so we're helping them learn you know all the great lessons of d d you know that diversity is a strength and that as a well-rounded party you can conquer challenges you couldn't Alone um we know from a lot of the research that it helps kids with social anxiety with learning to take turns one of my favorite favorite quotes from Chris Pine that's San Diego Comic-Con when we were previewing the movie was that he thought every school ought to have a DND program because when you gather around the table it doesn't matter if you're a brainiac or a jock or a nerd because all those differences melt away and you just

become a community and you're just having fun together so that's there are a lot of little things um at a store in Raleigh North Carolina in a historically black community A store owner was telling me about this couple and the husband kept wanting his wife to play Magic and she wasn't interested and they came in the store one day when there was the Kaya product on the on the box and the art on the posters on the wall and you know she was seeing this strong female Warrior that looked like her and she's like if you'll build me a kaya deck I'll learn to play and so he did and so it's you know little things Acro that you do across your product your marketing your community they all add up yeah I definitely wish some of that stuff existed when I was younger me too um yeah for sure like my kids I nervously DM for them at the beginning of the year

all girls they brought their girlfriends and we idm'd and after the session was over I took a pause and they're like that was the best thing I've ever done in my entire life and I was like thank God it didn't suck but yeah they're in an all girls robotics group and they're just so excited about DND and they're like opening the pages and they're seeing themselves in there which I think is really freaking awesome um the way that I found DND was uh totally by accident I was again this immigrant kid in like New Jersey and I like baseball cards and comic books and stuff and I was just walking down the street after getting dropped off on the bus and I was a latchkey kid and I'm like I walked I'm like that looks like a comic book space baseball card store and I walked in and it was a hobby shop it was called the adventurers Guild didn't last very long so this was like this very short moment in time if you're going to run a business make sure you allow customers to buy your products because they didn't they were buying it all for themselves anyway so I got to play D D and you know my mom came in and she's like what's going on here it's like 30 to 40 year old you know white males with this child playing this day

it's like yeah he's probably okay and I discovered DND that way but fast forward after that shop closed down I didn't play it again until I joined bonfire like seven years ago until somebody brought me back in I had played magic my whole life but DND was not there for me and so now I think things have changed so maybe one pivot we can make is um talk about kind of how that has actually happened because it wasn't really for me at the time but now I feel like it's grown to the tens of millions that you're talking about and people feel like it's for them what's happening in the halls of wizards that actually allows for that because I don't think it's like an accident you know I think there's a lot of that that comes down to having folks in the organization who also care deeply about this and we're always looking for ways that we can bring in more voices and more creators to it and you you see you see a real need to find out you know

how can we help the players find what appeals to them like what is the d d campaign you want to run now some of that we're going to have written a lot of that a Creator may have written and may be available on DM's Guild or on Kickstarter or other places and so part of the question we're asking right now is how can we help those creators better reach the players how can we help players find the content that they really want and so there's a bit of a conversation going on about how do we help them like you know patterns we're talking to creators a bit about that you know in in Magic I think when we go into the cons and we see people Playing Together part of what folks tell us is hey when I go to my local game store those are my local friends and get get to play with them but you having these events like we have had in Las Vegas and I October and we've recently had in Philly in February they're like I

get to see my friends from further away and I get to play with them and I was blown away by the number of parents who had brought their kids with them and the kids who were cosplaying and they were competing in the in the play tournaments it was just so much joy and so delightful so I think there's there was a real issue during the pandemic where you can imagine okay so you own a local game store you're a small business owner maybe your second job for a lot of for some of them it is and your business thrives on face-to-face interaction and face-to-face play and the world just shut down and so we did a lot of Outreach to wpn store owners to find out how we could help and so we help them build out capabilities to do Remote Play We

donated 10 million dollars worth of product to them to help them through that many of them started selling on e-commerce platforms which we were excited about as well we set up discords for their community for us those with those store owners it's a partnership for how do we help them grow their business because they're helping grow ours and so that's I think that aspect of it's not a loss it's the whole Community is a really key piece to this yeah that makes sense uh going back to the DND example with my kids you know perusing the pages and you see all the images there and they see themselves and if you rewind back and open up older books I don't think that would have necessarily been the case or the players that were playing those um what like how does that happen within Wizards like the whole creation piece and I know this is probably before because they've been doing this for a long time now but I imagine like rewinding back I don't know 10 15 years where the conversations are happening at

the studio level of like no but that's not authentic to DND or that's not authentic to magic magic is like this but obviously things have changed and the game is like in my opinion way more glorious as a result oh absolutely absolutely so it started with the decision in that perhaps instead of assuming that everyone was like the people in the studio that instead of building just based on our experiences or our perceptions we should get some consumer insights and so they did at that time it was mostly analog so they did a lot of surveys and turned out that while we had been building Magic the Gathering for example for the competitive player the vast majority of the people playing did it to play with their friends they they considered themselves social players and so that that one Insight changed the products we were building it

changed what programs we were focusing on and you saw more of a shift there it led to better representation in the cards because we we looked at not only what they were playing and how they wanted to play but who they were and we realized that we didn't have the level of representation we needed in the cards so you saw more more diverse artists come in because we outsourced the art to other people and so we we broadened that group so that you have more diverse voices being a part of that now the other one I'm super proud of is secret lair which is one of the sub Brands within magic and secret layer is a place that we do a fair amount of experimentation you may see different art treatments than you've seen before and we're seeing how people respond to them but there were people in the studio who said I have an idea let's turn this into a way we raise

money for things we care about and one said I got an idea let's do a set that's called black is Magic and we'll get all black artists and we'll do that set and raise money for black girls code and we raised more than a million oh well we raised about a million dollars for black girls code and that has been so well received within the community and in fact fast company named magic a brand that matters for 2022 because of using the product to raise money for black girls code and this past year we did Pride across the Multiverse and raised between a million and a million and a half dollars for the Trevor Project which is a wonderful organization but one of the stories that got me was a member of my senior team who was uh is the executive sponsor until tomorrow he's decided it's time for his next

adventure so sad he's leaving um he looked at the card and it made him cry because he never thought he'd see himself on a magic card so it's just it's the power of that being able to see yourself whether it's within an organization to be able to look up and see someone who looks like you and know that you can be successful there or if it's in a card or in a book to know I belong with this game yeah I think that that goes back brings me back to my license plate example of like man I'm looking for my name but there's such like a simple thing but I remember like when um was it Black Panther and like Wonder Woman came out and people are like those aren't like great movies I'm like what are you talking about like they're great movies and then look at the box office like it's crazy which basically means there are plenty of underserved people that are jumping oh totally really happy and I think there's another piece there where like I've actually been reading a

lot of books written by female authors because I'm like I don't think I really understand it the first couple books I'm like this feels really weird and then over time you kind of get used to it and you're like okay how I was thinking before it was kind of weird yeah your daughters will be better for that yes but you know it we're experiencing this right now so most of you may have seen that we did our first look for our universes Beyond magic set with Lord of the Rings and there's been some hate that's come out about how we represented pardon me if I say this wrong Aragon I'm still working on the pronunciation of this because the character is black and like we worked with Middle Earth on this Middle Earth was super excited about it but the haters the haters are like that's supposed to look the way I expected to look and I'm like well part of what I told the team is yeah the haters are going to hate but

the truth is focus on the joy that you're getting from the community about someone who's seen themselves for the first time who loves Lord of the Rings and never could picture themselves within it and so my favorite version of this is if you're on Tick Tock at all his name is Ebony he goes by ebony warrior he tries so hard not to cry he ends up crying he makes me cry every time I watch it because it's just the most visual representation of what it means to be able to see yourself how does something like that happen at Wizards like who makes that suggestion what are the conversations is it contentious at all or is something about the company that everyone's like yeah that's obviously the way you know I do think there's something about the company that largely leads to people or like yeah let's do this I don't think it's perfect by any means uh it was a suggestion from within the magic Studio and they were like well let's let's

reach out the cool thing we have the literary rights for Lord of the Rings and so we were able to work with more Middle Earth on it and talk to them about it and say listen this is how we would like to do this and it was it was really not overly contentious within the studio and Middle Earth was super excited about it and said yeah let's go I think it's worth giving this conversation of how does it happen let's talk for a minute about DND so D D's 50 years old 50 years ago people had different standards they had different cultural norms and let's just say that the there are some characters that were built the way they were built in to DND in the beginning wasn't cool like they in by today's standards by something that I would be proud of representing you know there were characters who were represented as monstrous or evil

and it used descriptions that are just way too close to how people talk about real groups in society and how we denigrate them and so that was you know a collective decision within the organization like this is not okay and so starting with the fifth edition they started trying to remove all of that so that you know when you're representing an orc or a drow this is now a character who can be just as morally and culturally complex as any other character which was not the case before um we don't always get this right we've been really deliberate about trying to remove this but occasionally things still go wrong so we do use cultural and sensitivity readers to read every word and look at every picture to say Yep this is okay

even that's still not perfect you know we um we we had a process breakdown in the past year we had people look at this is Magic cards but look at a magic card and totally miss something offensive in it and so then we had to go back in and take action on that but I think the intention and the desire to get it right is part of what's really core yeah and Disney's been doing some of that stuff yeah it's like going back and I'm guessing that all the changes that were well first of all it changes hard so if you've been doing something a certain way for a long time and all of a sudden people show up and say we need different things I think that's really hard I do think businesses are driving that more because it's also good for business and so is there anything that you could talk to on that front though yeah I think so let's go back a moment to when I was talking about magic and how they were building cards and sets that were just oh this is what we think they need and

then they did all the work on understanding the community better and what products needed to be built and how we needed to represent people within them and you know that business was a few hundred million dollars at the time and pretty not bad it's not a bad size for business but pretty flat wasn't growing and when we started doing the better you know representation of what the customers actually needed uh the growth rate just accelerated super super fast and we announced last year that for the full year of 2022 Magic the Gathering generated a billion dollars in Revenue and you know most people if you know Hasbro Brands they think of Nerf or Plato or other things first well this was the first billion dollar brand in Hasbro's history and I think a lot of it is credited to really focusing on who

your customers are and meeting their needs that makes sense I'm guessing from a person that's working at the company making these products now you're at the magic cons you see people live you're on YouTube you're seeing people really enjoying this and then you see the financial numbers and like all that stuff is probably really clicking like I'm on the right track yes and a thing with all the research when you're when you're starting to direct though like all these because I know you out so you you have like an insane Outsourcing we do right we do how do you direct to those people that have been doing this for so long like hey this is the direction that we're going please don't represent characters this way because I've noticed that a lot of the trophy stuff is going away yeah it's it's very much about setting your standards with those creators to say here's what we're looking for and it has led to that like oh I said we talk about neon kamagawa later so when we wanted to go do uh people said let's go do a new version of kamagawa and there were people in the magic Studio who were like oh are you

kidding that really didn't work that well last time why would we do that why would we revisit this but there were people who were passionate about it and said but let's go get Japanese artists to do the cards let's have the art style really push towards what it would be in Japan and it made all a difference I mean that hit that set was a smashing success and to my point about you want to I'd like to see us grow in Asia it's sold better in Japan by a significant amount versus other normal sets so it again goes back to that people need to be able to see themselves no that makes a lot of sense I'm just trying to imagine like in the studio because Wizards is Magic's been around 30 years yep there's people that have been working on that game probably still there for 30 years yes there are and so change again is hard but that game also hasn't meta and it constantly changes but even just those conversations of hey

some of these tropes they're getting kind of boring now I'm just trying to imagine some of these conversations because it's hard to see things differently right it's like hey this worked I don't understand what the problem is and then you bring in more people into the studio they're like that one bothers me like a little bit Yeah I think there is a pretty good voice within the magic Studio where people are looking at that you know there's a very cool wall where the future art is up and so you can sort of walk down that Hall and look at what's coming and people comment on it and talk about it and so that gives you a chance even before or you've sent it out to the artist to say conceptually here's how we may want to change this sum so it's it is has to be intentional like you have to set up processes where you're allowing people to participate in this and give feedback on it because you know if you let the people who've been doing it for 30 years just keep running it they're probably not the people who could see it right and so they but I will admit that the

gentleman who runs Magic the Gathering was a play tester before the first set ever went out but he's very good about allowing other people's perspectives in and he trusts that consumer research like as soon as he saw it he's also someone who wants who loves magic and so he wants everyone to love magic and to play it um and so yeah when somebody tells him you're going to reach more people in Japan and bring them into the ecosystem he's in that's exciting I read this book called uh got the conscious business and the one takeaway to remember is it's a mouthful there's a word called ontological humility and that's a mouthful about what that ontological humility says is hey if I have a Coke can here I can see this angle and I can project that what I think is on the other side but Cynthia sees this and I just have to trust her I can't just go and say I know what's on the other side because there might be something completely different kind of on the other side and that that's the journey

for me is like I've also been trying to learn and I've been asking people that although I don't deserve it like be patient with me because it's a progress bar and so when we get into these uncomfortable conversations sometimes I think those are the areas of opportunity because now I get to learn and become a more fully formed human and then we can work together to make exciting things yeah I think that part is so true because there's an element of asking for Grace and in a recent conversation with the entire Wizards organization one of the people who's been there the longest sent me a note and said you get all the grace because you're being so open and authentic and willing to learn and listen um part of what I try and do as a leader and I part of what I think my role is is to drive fear out of organizations because whatever the industry is it's really important to turn an issue

like even the ogl I was like okay this was bad now let's do the retrospective and let's learn from this and then we're going to create new infrastructure to make sure that doesn't happen again but you know there were calls on the internet for people including me to be fired and so you know there's a moment where you look at each other and go is this better for the brand I I literally asked the DND team would it be better for the brand if I left and they were like oh please don't because you actually ask these questions in a way that it is helpful to us and so I I think it's as if people live in fear creativity and Innovation cannot Thrive and so changing the culture and you know for the most part Wizards didn't have a culture of fear but I know for sure I can't let one creep in because if it

does they're not going to do their best work they're not going to be as creative or Innovative and so I use a I use a standard of okay let's learn for that from that let's not do it again but you I would encourage anybody who's leading an organization to try and make sure that people aren't living in fear no I share that um it's uh hey if you've got a if you've got a lot of fear in the room it's really hard to imagine what else there could be right so if you're making a game or trying to come up with something new and be Innovative like if you've got fear I think that just completely kills takes out all the oxygen from the room it does I read a recent quote on Instagram I didn't remember who actually wrote this but I think what they were what the quote said was something that I think studios are probably feeling as they navigate this is their the fear makes people feel like hey you're changing the thing that I love yeah and that makes it really hard for them to imagine all it could be if all of us kind of work together on that and so I kind of took that away I wish I

wrote down who who that was but right quite but I think that happens yeah all over the place it's like you're one team trying to make something awesome so how do you get the fear out of the room maybe that's another talk you should give because maybe so we'll think about that we can do this fireside chat thing again yeah see um so given all of this like what are some of the products that have come out recently that Wizards has been really proud of as a result of its culture because you put out a lot of problems we put out a lot of product uh one of the products I am proudest of that came out in the past year was journeying to the radiant Citadel anybody seen that book I bought it for the cover but I haven't used it yet oh my gosh this this book was 100 created by a group of diverse writers and it's they're telling the story set in the right writing it said it'll from their perspective and from their world

and what it's like and it's joyful to read so yeah I would encourage you to encourage you to read it and the writing's good because uh they were recently nominated for a nebula award nebula award for writing in games alongside the folks who did Elden ring and Horizon forbidden West so it's I'm super excited for them that they've been recognized this way that's awesome um yeah actually I don't know why that made me think of yesterday I was given a game pitch and so we're the most super secret stealth company that exists and so we don't really talk about ourselves also like we're really shy uh but um I give most of the game pitches to people that come and interview at our company or want to are thinking about it and um we started in the conversation leaning a certain way and it's like oh let's talk about you know Di and community and all this stuff and you know she's like oh well I've been on I went on to your website and I see page and I can see why

your game is the way that it is and I was like really because I'm like looking at it like all the work that we did like you can actually see that and she's like yeah I can tell that you care about it and that felt really good so one day you know hopefully when our game comes out I'm like oh maybe that will have an impact awesome and I think that's again back to the who you have inside reflects outside yeah yeah so I I advise encourage everybody to do that you know to that point we were talking about mechanisms earlier ways that you do this when when we interview at Wizards I talked about the fact that we have these requirements for diverse slates we also interview based on our values and so you know it's build a well-rounded party be legendary delve into dungeons don't split the party I mean you know when you are you're making sure that the person shares your values when you come in I think that part is super critical for

making sure the same way that you're you're thinking about the diversity of the candidates you're bringing in you can do that and have them share your values and that's part of what makes the whole studio click and that you're probably able to do because you know yourself or Wizards knows itself Wizards knows who that's been around for a really long time I mean what advice can you give to companies that are out there that are just starting out it's like hey I know that the meta like somebody at the studio told me like the med has changed I'm like that's such a great way to describe it the meta of creating games and The Meta players and all this stuff is changing and so how how would you advise companies that you know care about all the things that we just talked about as they're starting their companies like is there any advice for them because it is a kind of scary lonely place to try to figure this out well the first piece of advice I'd give is if you already have a group of people

within the studio who are all the same when you're making your first hire of someone who is other or different whether it's gender or it's ethnicity or it's sexual identity make sure that is a person who has grit and resilience and understands that they're going to be a change agent because being the first is hard it carries a lot of emotional weight it can be exhausting I say this is someone who for most of my career was the only woman in a room and I was having to find ways to progress myself in my career if you bring in if your first other higher is someone who is fresh out of school

they're probably going to struggle with it and so it'd be really easy then for the others for those of you who've been there a while to go see that didn't work so who your first hire is and then bringing in others quickly matters so we totally did what you said when we started the studio we were uh five guys and we knew that again the meadow was changing and we needed a company that was not Five Guys they're like okay we have to bring in women into the studio otherwise we're not going to be able to make the things that we want and create the studio that we want one of the earliest hires was uh was somebody straight out of school and so now I'm gonna have to call her and thank her and apologize she carried a lot of water for you I'm sure but we also did uh bring in a lot of people that were more experienced and were able to be patient with us and also teach us and so we're still learning and like progressing but I think you know I look back on my career the last seven years I'm like man I've grown so much

and I can't imagine who I would have been if I hadn't had that time yeah and all the lessons that have been being taught by more people that have lived lives that I haven't lived yet um so let's move a little bit uh how much time do we have left all right yeah the movies coming out next week the movie comes out March 31st and in case you don't know it's called Dungeons and Dragons honor among Thieves uh it stars Chris Pine reggae Jean page Michelle Rodriguez Sophia Lewis I'm looking at some of my team Liz yeah thank you and uh justice Smith and Hugh Grant there's also a cameo that I won't spoil because it's hysterical um I got to be at South by Southwest for the world premiere we're back to perks of the job and it was in the old Paramount Theater in Austin and it was very fan focused and

so there was a long line of people looking to get in I felt so bad for the ones who didn't make it in but I'm sitting there and listening to the people behind me talk about the campaigns they were playing and what they were dming or who their character was and you just you could hear the the joy in it I told a friend I was with I'm like I'm not going to breathe until we get the first laugh and she's like you're in trouble I don't think the first laugh comes for 20 minutes and I was like oh I don't think that's true five minutes in we got the first laugh and it was just raucous throughout the rest of it there was cheering there was clapping um Chris Pine was maybe cheering the loudest which was kind of funny um but at the end do they do a q a at South by Southwest and first person who was up was a lifelong D D fan who's played forever and he was like gushing about how awesome

the film was and he said it feels like a love letter to the fans and the that just overwhelmed the the screenwriters and the producers because that was exactly what they were aiming for and they wanted it to be accessible to people who hadn't played and so the next person up it's like you know I've never played but after seeing that I really want to so I'm gonna go play and they're like yes and the third person up was this African-American woman from Detroit who runs their Arts and Cultural program and she was like I don't play I'm never gonna play but I'm going to tell everybody I know in Detroit to go see this movie because it was awesome so uh it's been really great because it it really is a story about you know finding your family finding your people and then going on an adventure together to solve a problem not a single one of you could solve a

loan and so it's I hope you all go see it I've seen it three times now and I can't wait to see it again it's just a ton of fun how many times have you seen it now three okay I can't wait to see it it's a lot of fun it's a whole lot of fun pretty excited about that uh how um so the history of like video game movies has not been super kind yeah but recently it's been getting really great like yeah Kane's been really great stranger things it's not exactly that but has been really great um I think this movie is going to be a lot of fun uh the cast is also very diverse yes and I'm wondering like was that a studio Choice like how much was Wizards involved yeah this is oh this was a lot of fun for the studio so the way the studio was involved was by sitting down with um the the filmmakers and answering all their questions taking them through the lore and it was very collaborative like they talked about you know where uh they

wanted to set the set the whole adventure and uh in the gameplay they even ended up with we have a book that has some of the filmmakers in it as credits because it includes the lamb include something that was created through that gameplay um we talked a lot about the Easter eggs the creatures that we wanted to have and the things that are in through there and I'll tell you there's one thing that is wrong and we told them it was wrong and they were like yeah it's a fantasy game we're keeping it so a druid cannot turn into a monster but she turns into an owl bear and it is a cat out there it was really really cool so it's a great saying everybody's gonna love it and it's uh but it was a lot of collaboration and we did not have any say in who they cast but we described what a party should look like you know and Sophia will tell you that they were missing a cleric but in general it was a very well-rounded

party um and that was what was important to us is that you saw that diversity what you did there well-rounded well-rounded party yeah this is great and I was talking to I got to talk to some of the cast after Michelle Rodriguez wanted to know why isn't there a d d video game I'm like there's like hundreds of new video games and hey guess what there's one coming out in August called Baldur's Gate three you should play it um so she was pretty excited about that so they uh the cast ended up playing together oh amazing and they really had it no we did not record that they they this got filmed during the pandemic so they were stuck together in Northern Ireland and I think one of the things they learned is they don't want to go back to Northern Ireland to film again because they've seen everything they could see there after being there together with the sort of in isolation do you know if they had played before or no Sophia's was playing in school they we talked about who maybe had played the

most and I think they think it might have been Sophia uh he uh you never played um Chris Pine learned to play with his family his nephew taught him to play and he loved seeing his 80 year old father play a paladin um so he he really he really got into the spirit of it Michelle plays play has played a fair Mountain reggae at played but um it was just they had a lot of fun together you can see it I don't know if it was being stuck together in Northern Ireland or if it was playing d d together but that chemistry of that cast really shows up in the movie do they play uh I'm getting a little off topic but do they play the classes that they were in the movies or what classes were they in the movies okay let's see if I can do all this I may not be able to uh Chris Pine is a bard uh Hugh Grant is a rogue Michelle Rodriguez is a barbarian Sophia is a druid Justice is a sorcerer

I think that's everybody okay yeah I don't know if they played the same characters I'm excited I haven't seen that combination of characters before played by you know I have to tell you so they're they're you know back to representation and things there are people out there who are very upset about what great scenes both Michelle and Sophia have but I think the whole cast is very well balanced uh reggae has some amazing amazing fight scenes but Michelle Michelle really is good in the movie yeah I fast forwarding now after taking my kids to go watch it I think what's probably going to happen is there's some people are like oh that didn't actually meet my expectation and I imagine my girl is going to run out super excited having seen that so that's probably the Zone we're in right now I tell you that I think we're still at around 90 on Rotten Tomatoes Amazing yeah

in all the Press I've seen there's one guy in Australia who didn't like it okay but everybody else seems to love it yeah maybe to wrap up I'm going to ask uh one question so you've been at Wizards how long now 13 months okay so right in the start yeah Wizards have been around for how long well they've magic is really where it started so that's 30. um even though d d is 50 next year there'll be a whole celebration for of the 50th anniversary of d d next year um and we've been owned by Hasbro for 24. okay so those aren't the questions that's the setup okay for probably a company that's gonna Outlast all of us and I see you as having a tremendous responsibility no pressure because no pressure magic and DND so much as you look out into the future and you imagine your moment like a Chris passing on the Baton or the torch to your next you know whoever is

going to be the next Steward um when you look back on your career what do you what is the impact that you hope you will have made at watsi well can I start by saying I hope it's not anytime soon because I love the team I'm having fun uh it's not often in your life you get to have fun at work um it should be it should be you know I I hope that the Legacy will be I we've been a good Steward of the brands and of the community and by that I mean both the external and the internal Community I hope that the organization is a place people choose to work because working there feels amazing and they feel valued and respected and they feel like they belong I hope that we have looked continued to increase how we look at our customers and what their needs are because

it may be they may be 30 and 50 years old but this is the world's changing and you know people people travel for work people are at a conference it can be really hard to schedule your next DND campaign event when people are all over the place and so I hope that we've found the right digital tools that increase engagement that help people connect um I hope we've brought in a lot more creators into into the space and that there's a lot more players because we've been intentional about people feeling like they belong awesome well thank you very much thank you this was fun no this is great and thank you everybody that came thanks for coming thank you for your time [Applause] [Music]