Creating Inclusive Content In the Metaverse and Beyond

[Music] hi i'm laura higgins i'm the director of community safety and digital civility at roblox i'd like to welcome you to our panel thank you so much for joining us today um i'm going to be moderating this incredible panel discussion today we're going to be focusing on creating inclusive content um so at roblox our mission is to build a platform that enables billions of users to share experiences together the roblox concept of a platform of shared experiences is sometimes referred to as the metaverse we're going to talk a little bit about that later but essentially it's about creating these persistent shared 3d virtual spaces in a virtual universe roblox really is a new way for people to be together when we can't be together in person it's a global community of people coming together to share experiences and every day millions of people come together to create connect and explore millions of immersive virtual experiences together

all of which are created by the roblox community having a healthy diverse and positive community is everything to us and encouraging our developers to be mindful when they're making those experiences to make sure that the platform is safe and welcoming to everybody um i'm really pleased to be talking about this topic today it's something personally really important to me um and i know that it means an awful lot to to the people who are using our platform so um you know i'm i'm really looking forward to having a deep conversation about this and going into a little bit more information uh sorry into into a bit more depth about this topic um so without further ado i would like to introduce the panel so i'm going to hand over t and that please could you introduce yourself hi sure happy to be here i'm the founder and ceo of toya an israeli female ed studio so we're based in tel aviv but have a multinational team and we focus on creating equal realms and gaming

experiences for girls and boys and we do that on roblox we have a couple of games released over the past two years and six weeks ago we launched the first adaptation for the animated series miraculous ladybug amazing thanks annette um and can i hand over to you robin could you introduce yourself yeah sure my name is robin hunnicky i'm the co-founder and ceo of phenomena here in san francisco we've been around for about nine years now and we make games that we think bring joy and creativity to the world and we are also working inside of roblox now um we have a small environment there called beanstalk which is actually an alpha and are working on a few other projects inside this space that are currently unannounced but we're really excited about um i think that uh my other sort of life when i'm not a ceo of a game company is that i am a professor at uc santa cruz and i am the founding director of the arts games and playable media program there which is

now one of the fastest growing majors on campus so i'm an advocate for young people making games and that's one of the reasons why i find roblox so exciting amazing thanks robin um and finally last but not least ashley would you mind introducing yourself please um hi my name is ashley and i've been creating on this platform for about six years now since i was 11. and i focus on making various games and avatar items with my um girlfriend nicole um we've started a business called tailswipe llc not too long ago planning on registering it next year um focus on creating opportunities for more neurodiverse and disabled and individuals such as myself and serving as a departure from harmful practices made in traditional industry spaces one of the projects we're working on under this name is a large-scale lgbt social space

um that's wonderful thank you so much ashley i'm really looking forward to to getting into conversation with each of you about these projects um so um let's talk a little bit about what we mean by inclusive content so ah what do we really mean by that i think perhaps if i can throw it out to each of you just to kind of give me a bit of feedback when we say inclusive content what does that mean to you how about let's throw it to you this time robin you go first i think in phenomena we we sort of define the idea of inclusivity as coming from the imagination of as many people from the different walks of life as possible so actually it starts with where the content comes from um you know at the company where over 60 percent uh people who identify as coming from an underrepresented group so you know have tried to really build an environment where um inclusivity is part of the everyday concern of the people that are

creating the content um and i think that when you get to some place where you can have open conversations about what a broad group of people want then you're getting closer to building spaces that don't inadvertently exclude others lovely ashley what does inclusive content mean to you do you have a kind of definition for that yeah um to me it means sort of a body of experience not just included various um often overlooked minorities in the forefront of your projects but something more nuanced as well putting thought into how others of these various groups will interact with your content edits as well and being sure to consider these different perspectives inclusive content strive to make different people from all walks of life comfortable to explore and interact with what you've created brilliant lovely anna is there anything you can add to that not sure actually but just you know to say that i think that inclusion actually can mean different things to different

people so um atoya i think that you know our mission is connected to creating greater inclusion for girls and women and we think that roblox is the best place to do that and what it means is that when we discuss the game design we would say she and not just he most of the time when describing the end user so sometimes you know it may sound like an insignificant nuance but language i think is the foundation of the world when you know building and when using inclusive terminology and while developing a game is reflected not only within the organization but also in the final game so brilliant yes you um is there anything that you're particularly focusing on within your work that's related to this topic um robin you're nodding what are you doing yeah so i actually have a mug here for a game

that we made called luna and in luna we made the game as a fairy tale it's all about um different animals um and it's it's actually a game about recovering from trauma so the sort of core narrative is about letting go of something that's a traumatic experience and letting yourself move past something that maybe you're carrying around in your in your tummy it's kind of the analogy but when we were working on the game we removed all gender pronouns from the concept so that no one was ever talking about any of the characters specifically in a gendered way and made it so that you could identify with any of the animals in the in the game as you or as someone you know as a way of kind of creating more of a of a dialogue around um personal narrative and being able to project your personal narrative in the space and since then i've really been um sort of focusing a lot on how across games like journey and then luna even with tom the ideas of the characters are really informed by this idea that you're not you're not necessarily gendering them in your mind

when you're making them and in my next game i'm trying to see if i can build a really truly diverse and interesting environment where there's a single body type that you change um by how you dress it and how it performs in the space as opposed to the the sort of core uh components of it so basically like the sims one building an entire experience on a single set of animated properties so that's actually one of the big experiments i'm working on right now that sounds really fascinating robin well we'll see and that is there is there anything that's like really focusing you on this project at the moment on this topic at the moment um i think that you know with one of our original games like my farm and roblox like we aspired to many and varied representations of farms so from asia and africa and different countries in europe like spain and germany and we wanted everyone to be able to choose the style of their farm from a wide and representative range and to manifest their personality in a

manner that is free from you know traditional anachronistic representations of harm and the other thing we did was to include npcs of female farmers because looking at other you know farm genre games on roblox we just saw um male farmers all over the place and so we thought that this experiences would reflect different cultures and nationalities which go beyond the american-centric representation and so this is what we were doing uh on with my farm um ashley so i know you've been creating things within roblox for some time so can you can you tell us a little bit about how you're thinking about inclusivity and what you're focusing on right now um well my focus relating to this is simple um providing representation for marginalized and often overlooked groups creating opportunities and spaces for us to thrive and aiding and gradually shifting both online spaces and the general development workflow to be

much more mindful of these issues all things that are extremely important but on the same token what we are often proud of growing up in plenty of these environments have really served to make this the forefront of my focus in the industry i know how devastating it was for me to not have these various considerations widespread and i seek to do everything i can to make sure these issues don't hold true with other individuals as well um continuing with um robin's definition of i think a trauma-focused game um my first serious devops um albeit never fully realized project was consomme which was a story game to express a lot of the struggles i've been through realizing my trans identity while traversing an extremely negative environment at home and otherwise i plan to continue work on it in the coming years this being one of my larger passions developing experiences hopefully resonating and helping lgbt youth who've gone through similar

situations fantastic thank you um yeah i mean all of those things are so important and we've already touched on so many different themes about you know inclusion and representation so i'm really looking forward to digging into some of those ideas a bit more um so as i say during this session you know we're going to explore what good representation looks like why it is so important and sometimes why it's really hard you know we've already touched on some huge topics there we all want to make sure that these spaces feel safe and welcoming um and that when people join places like the metavest and online spaces that they're having a good time so you know i mentioned the metaverse before what does it really mean i mean as i say it's a term coined in science fiction originally it's now been used for decades but we're only really starting to see it become a real thing now in the online world um and particularly within platforms like roblox so in essence these 3d online spaces where people can seamlessly move from one experience to another

taking their online avatar and identity with them quite often taking their friends with them and going through all these experiences through entertainment like concerts and art galleries and fashion shows they can do learning they can do work in these spaces all in one platform so really what we're doing is replicating the real world but now online um providing spaces like that that are really inclusive we have to think way beyond safety of course that's absolutely essential and that should be the first thing we think about but then it's about building these other things around it we want to make sure that every member of the community feels they belong they have equity and that they're represented we all know if you don't see it you can't be it so you know i think what happens online is a real reflection of what's going on offline we are all facing huge societal issues right now that perhaps have become far more prevalent than before how do we start to address them so i think we're going to dig into some of these really big topics now

um so what do we really mean um is it enough sorry to just translate languages to provide language support for different regions um how do we really make these games totally globally inclusive i'm gonna hand that over time um i i think that it's starts for me with the team so who's on my team that can think not who are they who do they represent um because this would definitely translate to the experience they will be looking to create and we know that the games industry have been like dominated by a very male centric perspective for a long long time and i think that one of the key a metrics to changing that is comprising a team that has different age group that

represent different you know personalities nationalities genders and in a way that will translate into the experience you're looking to create i have no doubt because i've seen it happening in toya once you know you have a discussion in the brainstorm around the game and everyone can bring in their own a culture and personal experience this will reflect and the experience you'll be looking to create so and it will almost become like a non-issue and once this is like something you're accustomed in doing within your team and the discussions really does it becomes an issue yeah thank you and that's that's really fantastic and and you know i think that's something we can really think about isn't it is just getting those shared ideas right from the beginning right from conception is really really important so um we know there have been quite a lot of trends

and developments in the gaming space all around diverse communities and creating inclusive content what do you think game designers and developers should keep in mind when they're coming up with these new games or content or virtual items as you create ashley i'm going to start with you robin could you kick this one off please yeah i mean i think that you know what we've been sort of talking about you know in general is true in the specific as well right so vocabulary figuring out how you're going to talk about um the kinds of mechanisms that are in your game so for example we built a game that was a tower defense title and you know tower defense is a genre and tower defense is like you put a tower down and then you you know you defend your territory against enemies right and looking at the genre itself you know the team was really asking what does it mean to just go someplace and put your stuff down and then take and take and take like how do you decolonialize this narrative how do you make it you know not racist how do you make it inclusive

what's the kind of backstory for an environment um and a game world where people could feel included by participating in this in this relatively you know command and conquer style gameplay that's been a hobbyist game uh genre since the beginning of games right when you look at actually developing your your games and looking at like what genres are popular you have to kind of do a little bit of unpacking about the the history of where these games come from and most often they come from military history and they come from a place where the people that were making them had access to computers because they were in the military industrial complex so just actually starting there with like the definition of the genre and then the other thing that we always try to do is think about what the user experience is that we really want if you want to build a game that creates a feeling of joy or creativity or in the case of luna a sense of letting go then you really need to build that into every actual aspect of the game so if at the beginning of the game you're solving a puzzle and then you're building out a world and then you're going into that world to engage with the characters you

know if everything leads to a moment where you're helping a piece of of trauma escape a character and go into the sky and become part of the moon you know that's the narrative that came then you really have to be focusing all of your energy on that transformative moment of letting go that's going to be at the end of every chapter and so really building the development beats around a shared language that takes away kind of notions of privilege or control um authority and so on and then also building towards something that's different and i think that you know this is it it happens on a team but it it happens because you make it part of the process so you have to build a team where people feel comfortable saying i don't really like this this is a little bit like this example film that we're using for example for inspiration in the in the boards is really whitewashed version of of an asian narrative you know all the characters in the film were white i feel uncomfortable about that as an asian-american person or whatever you

need to build an environment where people feel safe to say those things and i think what a nat and um and actually i've talked about already is really about building an experience for people but it comes from the people themselves yeah they're fantastic and i think having that healthy challenge from the people around you that's why we hire these people exactly creative abrasion it's a good thing yeah absolutely absolutely um i i identify with what robin just said i think it's about redefining culture and to some extent and i can give an example of a discussion we had a while ago with a christmas update we wanted to have in one of our games and we were starting talking about santa claus and his wife and we're like israelis it does not apply to us so and then we have like european members in the team and so it does not apply to them as well and so all kinds of winter meth came up and we started like it was like an incredible discussion

where they were sharing a lot of you know their historical childhood stories and by the end of the day this was all manifested into the christmas update in a really i think spectacular way because it was like representing um different lifestyles and myths and that is for me expanding the experience of christmas and this specific update so it was like a win-win for me like from all aspects i would say yes absolutely and we can all keep learning and these things as well you know i think for us there's a moment of growth there it's really interesting so we've kind of talked about advice for the developers or the creators here but what about the community how do we create these communities that support the diversity um how can we really showcase that work in general how do we get it

out there how do we get people acceptance of this kind of change in the way that we want to create things and that do you want to go first on this one i i think that yeah happy to one i think that one of the keys to being able to support uh diverse contributors is to make sure the community you're building is a safe space so we take extra care towards minorities to ensure that their needs are met members who do not support minorities or who are disrespectful are swiftly removed from our community and we ensure that we have admins who are approachable and able to help anyone who has issues and there are like i think many a many ways to make everyone feel welcome and some tips i can share are like you know have uh clear rules including a banning or blocking system and encourage people to express any aspects of their lives

that they wish to express and and ensuring that your admin teams contains a diverse group of people can also really help everyone feel welcome so i think that once the community feels safe and welcoming and it's demonstrated that diverse people are welcome it becomes easier to start highlighting their own work so yes this is how we approach it with toya brilliant thank you robin did you have anything to add on that topic yeah i actually think that like my experience building journey was was really educational here uh trying to build an online space where two people would be interacting with one another but you would not have any idea of their gender their age where they were playing from by removing all the player data so that they were just an anonymous being um you know a lot of people had the experience of playing journey where they thought that that character was an ai and didn't realize they were playing

with multiple people over a period of levels and then at the end of the game were really blown away by the sort of screen that showed how many partners you had played with and it really it really showed me a couple of things the first the first few things were really about structurally how you build the design of a game um especially how you build communication systems inside a game has a huge an impact on the tone of the experience so if you go to a a house party at a random house that you know a friend of a friend says oh someone's having a house party you go you show up there's a ton of anxiety around who's going to be at the party if am i dressed appropriately you know are there going to be activities at the party that i want to do or they're going to be things there that i don't like like lots of illegal drugs or a ton of dancing which makes me anxious right and like putting yourself in that situation is a huge it's a huge burden especially for someone who's not neurotypical and i am not so like you know as someone who has anxiety about going to public places that i don't understand when i think

about what would make a community accessible it's that i can show up without being on i can choose the environments that i'm in and i get to contribute when i feel comfortable and like there are some really great papers um for example project horseshoe has a paper on online relationships and the way that people develop relationships the sims community has has done a lot of work in the space um there's a history of designers developing online spaces where they really ask what are the levers that i have to pull right away and do i have to do it as soon as i show up do i have to perform and i think asking those kinds of questions is important and then the other thing is again we have built a lot of games that are about conquering they're about being a king of the hill this is like a a huge genre inside of roblox is the players that want to be king of the hill you know you can say queen of the hill but in the end that implies a hierarchical structure and winners and losers and

really asking yourself for something like like a game like journey but what's a way that i can interact with other people that implies no power that is reciprocal and reciprocated at will by the other person and so you know for example i can't talk to them but i can sing to them well when i sing to them they glow and they can fly so they get a benefit and i get to hear a beautiful sound like that's a reciprocal sustaining and mutually fulfilling relationship i think these are the kinds of things you have to ask yourself when you're building a community from from day one what are the levers and do i have to perform right away because if you throw people into these experiences no matter where they come from they're going to feel anxiety it's going to impact their experience and in the long run it's going to make them feel less safe regardless of whether you're really explicitly thinking about minorities women trans folks queer folks you know people that are differently abled yeah no i totally agree with you i think yeah all of it needs to be organic and a gentle process to get people in it to

really immerse themselves so yeah i love that ashley i'm going to come to you with a very slightly question a slightly different question so i'm thinking more about the community and the feedback that we get from the community um you know is it is it helpful to get that feedback from the community that you're trying to reach what's helped you with your roblox community especially um i mean i absolutely can't stress enough how important feedback from marginalized people is way too often have i seen you know bigger um beginner creators come in both on and off the platform left to consider if barrier games content is accessible to a wider audience disabled and neurotypical individuals especially as a direct result this ends up both alienating a good portion of your audience and very severely limiting your reach things that could easily be figured out by both research and consulting and reaching out to your

audience to make sure your content is as accessible as possible there are plenty of people you can ask for feedback while making content those with colorblindness low motor control and neurodiversion individuals are all great places to start it's important to also remember that not everyone experiences disability the same one colorblind person may have trouble seeing certain colors and another may have trouble distinguishing them everyone's unique which is why these scriptures are important yeah that's i mean that's such a good point and you know the flip side i guess is that the more of these things we can do the more we're having those conversations the more we can help people who are not experienced those things to understand that there are so many nuances that it's different for everybody you know we can all sit here and say oh i know what color blindness is but we don't unless you experience it so just to try and

have somebody share their personal experience with you and perhaps a variety of those experiences i can see that that would be really helpful in getting people to really understand and also that representation topic as well um what about you guys how you know do you get feedback from your communities how do you manage that and i'll throw it to you fast um i think that with roblox um once you feel like you're the community it means that you're on your way to success to the extent that you have successfully found the team that is the community and reflects the community and but it's not just about that i think that for us it was also about successfully creating a process where the community is involved from the beginning so on our discord channel there are like thousands of girls boys non-binary who are constantly

constantly playing our games and we share every feature and every new character and every idea we have so on a weekly play test and then our community manager you know invites everyone who wants to join and give their feedback and there's like a conversation of like sometimes two hours a week of what they think we should add and how and why and so it's like super relevant super interesting and a lot of that feedback is being taken back and implemented into the process even a lot a lot before the game is released so i think that this is a part of you know working with being a part of the community for sure brilliant now robin i know that you engage with the communities because i saw you speak at our roblox developer conference a couple of years ago um and i know you know a lot of our developers just were desperate to come and talk to you about the stuff you've been working on how else do you do it outside of

roblox how do you engage with your community and what sort of feedback do you get so we have a pretty active social channel outside of roblox um we get a lot of we get a lot of feedback from the user community and user reviews if you go to like our steam page especially for games like luna which have um they reach a certain community like they're built for that community like luna was not built to be a triple a blockbuster it was built to be a conversation point for people that are struggling in some way and need a chill kind of cool easy place to kind of be and experience themselves and have some time with themselves and i think we get a lot of feedback on those channels and i think one of the things that's really important to point out is that as a developer especially if you're established and you've been in the community like i've been making games for almost 20 years and my first product was the sims you can really get a sense of how a dialogue with the community about like what annette is talking about you know like about what the features are what would you like to see how would you like to engage with this product as you move

forward like if you could add anything like to this expansion pack what would it be you know and they'll always say oh snow which is of course a really difficult thing to add to a game you have to add it to every asset right so you know you learn to have a dialogue with the community not only about what their wishes are but also about the development itself and it's a teaching moment like you're building within the community as you discuss with your your players and your co-creators you're building a sense of shared ownership but you're also letting them know like what the limitations are what what what the prioritization schemes are how we make decisions how how how development takes time and as as people get more educated about games and gaming spaces um they become more interested in becoming a co-creator or co-imaginate imaginer or like a visionary in your space and you really you're really giving them the opportunity to feel involved in a way that is it takes it takes it to the next level like they might be inspired to

to build their own space and roblox or to to pick up unity and try something new and in my mind a world where more people are building interactive material that expresses their own perspective is a world where more people can engage with others perspectives and learn what does it feel like to be differently abled in this way or this way what does it feel like to to feel isolated in this body or to move to a new country and try to be at home by eating different foods that you miss you know like when you look at some of the content that's being released right now especially in vr there's a huge opportunity for the audience to become the creators themselves and i think it's really important for us as established developers to to engage with that and build bridges and skills brilliant thank you and that is the perfect segue to my next question we've talked a bit about what you can do as the creators yourselves we've talked a little bit about bringing in those different perspectives and those different voices from the community and

getting that kind of those feedback links going how bearing in mind you know this is a brilliantly diverse panel yay um but we know even gender representation is nowhere near where it should be how do we bring in these diverse communities how do we welcome them in so they can be those creators how you know so that you know we want to get to a point where diverse is the normal but it isn't there yet so what do you think we can do going forward to make those spaces to encourage that talent and that creativity but that's in a way that people are kind of not being dragged into it but are running to it uh anna i'm going to come to you first um so i think for me i'm always thinking about okay how can i improve recruitment for tutoria and and posting our job descriptions and the dev forum in roblox that allows every community member to apply as is a step forward for me and we pay a

lot of attention to how we define the role and leave it as open as we can and as well as you know emphasize diversity and inclusion to make our jobs feel more accessible for those who may not consider themselves eligible candidates so for me it's like okay so how do we make everyone even the ones that they so want to apply but they won't unless we really facilitate this so let's give it another thought and and make it accessible for everyone who can be a brilliant game designer but is not on our team yet so i this is something i'm focusing on all the time when recruiting yes thank you um ashley i think you know i'd love to hear your thoughts on this but also thinking about you know that slightly younger audience that you're probably looking for within roblox what yeah what do you think really works for them for you know um kind of underrepresented groups in within the

youth sort of sector what do you think is engaging with them um i mean well the biggest way to get someone to participate is actually making them feel as though they're invited um not an outlier second thought when it comes to both developing projects and pushing the development environment on aspiring traders we often lose people from the latter either hostile development or one that doesn't care to consider or accommodate for issues of people like us trying to get into the space as i mentioned earlier there are plenty of harmful practices made in the game development industry making it especially impossible for neurodiverse and disabled individuals get pretty far something that can often be reviewed with this basic consideration brilliant thank you and i would just like to add yeah i was just going to say that like one of the biggest things that's happened as a result of govind is that we have

permission to let people work in their environments at home where they're comfortable it's really really common for uh you know people that are on the asperger's or autism spectrum for example to really struggle with being in a shared office space where there are a lot of uncontrollable smells and noises um and and interruptions and being at home in your own space where you have control over your space if you're differently abled having the accessible technology that you already have being able to to purchase that and send it to people and having a a wave of people realizing oh i need to actually have an ergonomic setup i need to be able to get away from my computer for breaks because i have to do child care you know there's been a huge conversation as a result of covet around accessibility um i'll give you a perfect example when i first founded phenomena here in san francisco and was looking for an office space i found it almost impossible to find a building that was affordable that had ada compliant um you know uh

entryways that was accessible to someone who might have a wheelchair and it just was like okay well if we can't build a wheelchair accessible office space on a budget if we can't find a place then we'll just we'll just have a work from home policy that if we hire you and you and you can't get access to the space we'll have a work from home policy but then it generated this huge conversation we're like what does it mean to be the person as as ashley is saying who isn't at the office and like how do you create a sense of well-being and inclusion for people that can't be in the physical office that you know was 10 years ago basically um when i look back at that conversation now i can remember signing the lease that said if someone complains about this it's your responsibility to fix it it's not the landlord's responsibility there's legal terminology in the leases that essentially offshore a lot of these accessibility issues so we were able to afford a large office the very first thing we did was look for something that was accessible street level all the bathrooms everything it's hard for people who are starting out to instantiate the rules and the

spaces that they want to because in many ways there are financial or legal barriers and so it's just really important to continue to broaden this conversation as a community and to make demands of the wider community the rental communities for example in your city um to really step up and meet these concerns um where we're working and also to be able to have those conversations in your team yeah absolutely i mean i think you know if there is any kind of silver lining to coven it's obviously been horrific for everybody um and the impact is felt globally on all generations but we know particularly you know people who already have these sort of difficulties feel isolated it's been really really difficult young people we know have really really struggled with it um you know hopefully we're going to start heading back in the right direction but as i say if there is a silver lining it was kind of a leveler all those people had been told no you must be in the office nine to five you know no we can't support work from home well they're gonna really struggle with

that argument now and diversely we know that there are some people because of their sort of isolation they need the partnerships and the working face-to-face with people so hopefully there'll be a balance and we can accommodate what people need that kind of individual um packages for people and really respecting their different needs that is what inclusivity is about isn't it again it's not about saying well if you're in a wheelchair this is what you get it's about that individual person and what support they need so yeah i think that's it's a really important topic to look at that um i was just coming to robin to just say about you know particularly around um you know any trends that you've been seeing recently around how we bring in these underrepresented groups obviously you've talked a little bit about physical disabilities um what about kind of the representation stuff more broadly have you seen anything new that you think's worth sharing yeah i so so phenomenal is what's called a deliberately developmental organization a ddo there's

a paper um on it there's free literature on it actually on the internet through the harvard business review um and you can look it up deliberately developmental organization there's also a really great book called and everyone culture which is about building communities of practice around the concept of your edge or how you're developing um and the core concept of the practice is essentially that everyone at the company from the ceo down recognizes that they're a person that has a complicated life that things happen that they don't know the answer to everything that sometimes they make mistakes and need to be corrected and need feedback but also that they welcome that feedback because it helps them grow and if you build an organization with this kind of seed of being vulnerable and bringing your full self to the office it leads to a lot of other knock-on effects for example the concept of having to be at an office from say 10 a.m to 5 p.m um has its own structural

ideas and being able to say i'm really struggling this week i'm going to take a couple of extra days off no questions asked everyone on the team will move around that person and figure out how to deal with their tasks so that that person can get the space and the time they need to be mentally well or i'm dealing with a health issue at home or whatever um the more you you surface those needs which are just human needs in a work culture the better your work culture is and the more supportive it is of for a variety of people so that's one way to do it and then the other thing i think that i've seen a lot recently especially in the academic space is the inclusion of a diversity equity and like anti-racism statement in any job application which says please outline your experience with these issues how you're affecting those issues in your work and what your aspirations are in the space reading that ahead of taking the rest of the resume in and then also anonymizing the resume as much

as possible removing identifiers from the resume that would otherwise bias you about the experience in the resume if you read the diversity statement first and make call a call of the resumes based on that and then read these anonymized resumes you get a very diverse pool and actually it's exceptionally helpful because it's very easy to spot language in the diversity statements that's talking the talking points but not really walking them and i think that that practice has been really helpful to me and my colleagues at school have really educated me quite a bit on the ways in which there's just so much unconscious bias in the way that we hire and so i think those two things have really been have been structurally you know reformative and transformative for me fantastic thank you um and even you know i'm just thinking back to the kind of age-old issues trying to get women into these kind of workforces so we still hear that when they're getting options at school of which topics they're going to do for their exams they're still

pushing girls towards the caring and the nursing and all of those lovely soft skills um definitely you know when when people want to do proper stem subjects they kind of wow are you sure is that what are you thinking you're gonna do um and so it's really disappointing that i still regularly hear those conversations are happening but then even in the workplaces you say flexibility whatever whether it is a child care whether it is you know as you say sickness or i'm just not coping today i just don't want to come in we should all respect that and support that um if we're hiring good quality people and we trust them then we should be providing that as a standard so it's a shame that we're even having to have that been in the conversation but here we are i also actually saw a wonderful example this morning on a call i had a a call with some colleague safety colleagues in australia at the safety commissioner's office um and as i was just scrolling through the website um they have a beautiful statement which i'll just read a little bit of it but e-safe technology is the

traditional custodians of country throughout australia and their continuing connection to land waters and community we pay our respects to aboriginal and torres strait islander cultures and to elders past present and emerging and then there's a little bit of a content warning on there because it's something that would be you know highly offensive and upsetting for people should they see the content and i just thought that was so sensitive so subtle it's not like a big poppy you know pop up in the middle of the screen and they'll shout it's just there it's subtle but it just felt very respectful to me very inclusive and yeah just i was really pleased that it just happened today and we were able to talk about it so um yeah i think that's a really great example but yeah thank you i think you know some some really interesting points for us to think about and to keep building and iterating on that definitely so okay we're going to turn a little bit into the tricky stuff we're talking about the positive positives and what we're trying to do now what are some of the barriers to creating really inclusive spaces from my experience a lot of people get

it really really wrong um so i'm going to come to you first ashley do you have any thoughts on this why why it's so hard for some people why does it go wrong um well as for some of the biggest barriers um most definitely the community as gaming hasn't been accessible in the past it's attracted a largely unaccepting and even harmful community um we have a long while to go before we can truly say that the game that the gaming community is accepting in various different ways um one of the biggest issues i've seen especially among developers on the roblox platform who are often quite new to the field is a lack of appreciation for well-established and reliable accessibility guidelines like um wche and the like even this something as simple as text contrast

goes ignored that's a lot of people here are already excluding and alienating as a result another one is usage of inclusive language a few commonly mistaken examples is the usage of he or she um instead of they which which could um include a lot more um gender identities and populations and stuff like that or you know for um profession for profession uh descriptions like people will use fire man and policemen well you know alternate terms much more inclusive ones would be firefighter or police officer instead of having them all um gendered in some way when an adult you should consult others uh talking to people who experience issues firsthand is much better than completely approaching them on your

own not doing this allows a larger risk of either grossing risks representation misrepresenting the populations you're attempting to be mindful of or making matters worse yeah fantastic you raised some brilliant points though ashley and uh you know i think platforms all over are guilty of quite a lot of those and again you know the gendering of job roles i mean again it's just it's back to that point we are still bringing up small children using that terminology you'd really think we would have probably would have moved forward but and and people are really resistant people you know when we hear the snowflakes and all of these sorts of things being thrown around because people are effected that you don't want to call it a policeman you know come on um yeah we really need to push for change i think in these areas and that is there anything you could add about the barriers why do people get it so wrong all the time you know sometimes people are afraid of what they do not know and it's about communication

mostly so they wouldn't really have the basic tools for communicating with others that are not that doesn't seem to them like they are so different so it start from there i think and from thinking within my team anyway there are some times where we are having lunch and there are like funny conversations happening because some of the worlds are so different fundamentally different from each other so how do i accept that how can i feel comfortable to share who i am and be accepted by others and so i think that you know it's about developing the communication tools within your team within your family with your children where you're living so it's about that i think this is the chef that needs to occur in order for us to feel comfortable and for it to become like a non-issue so

i think that it's like it's a it's a big challenge but if we start with small baby steps then for me it's like okay let's figure out what would be the best tools for communicating and let's find the things that are common and and that we can collaborate on so i think that one of the things we love to do in the team with the remote but also with you know the israeli-based team is to play we like to play together so every week someone choose a game we all hop in and we play for an hour an hour and a half and we talk while we play and it's like fantastic and it brings out so much of you know who you are and what you like to do and what happened to you today and so this makes people feel much more closer so you know perfecting those tools of communication it can be really helpful i love that that kind of play therapy is one but we know you know it's often used within kind of child

care and and literally in therapy is you don't sit down across a desk from a young person and get them to talk about their issues you go for a walk you take them for a drive you do something totally different and you're gonna get a really different response and just that relaxed comfortable conversation and i love that as an idea for a team i am definitely taking that back to my team we're long overdue some play time together robin is there anything you can add around the barriers why is it why is it so hard for people i think you know one of the more recent books that i read that i really enjoyed um is a book called braiding sweet sweet grass by another robin robin wall kimmerer she's a an indigenous plant scientist um who's actually born and raised in the same area that i grew up in upstate new york in the great lakes region um and uh i think that one of the the best things about her book which is a series of essays around different topics but always focusing on sort of sustainability the environment and the ways in which we engage with the planet

is that there are really really different ways to approach the concept of authority the concept of knowing and the concept of having like in the cultures that have colonized the planet for the most part there's this performance of authority performance of knowing performance of structural power that we unconsciously take on and what she does is in a really beautiful and poetic way because she's also a poet um is is is unpack some of the language the scientific language around plants you know categorizing objects thinking about species our relationship with species and one of the one of the most interesting things in the book is this concept of the honorable harvest which is that her people in the original sort of configuration that they found themselves growing up in the world um had a practice of whenever they went someplace and found something like let's say mushrooms or sweet grass that you could harvest you never take the first thing you find you ask before you take

anything so you you sit and you sit with the place and say is it okay for me to have some of this you leave half and you leave it better than you found it so if you find a place for example to set up camp you set up camp on a river when you leave you leave a bundle of firewood where you had a fire to welcome the next person that will find that place and the idea is that animals and people live in the space together and the idea of the honorable harvest is that even if other humans don't eat the mushrooms perhaps a deer will perhaps perhaps a little raccoon will and that deer or raccoon or whoever is living in that space is part of the structures and the systems that make that place sustainable and i think when i listened to not talking about this or actually talking about this idea of of the fundamental lack of inclusion what i always hear beneath these things is the performance of authority the performance of knowing and that vulnerability that you get in a team when you have you know lunch and learns about different cultural food practices or like a donut meetup where you just eat with a random person have a

donut and talk even through the pandemic these kinds of things that we've instituted at phenomena they're about letting go of this notion of authority and really being just a person in a space and i think that her book is really good at sort of unpacking how deeply and structurally this idea of authority power having owning is part of our as part of our approach as as sort of a western influence culture and it's a really good thing to sort of to ask yourself on a daily basis what you have what you own and what you think you know yeah i think that idea of kind of nurture is really interesting and i'm fascinated i actually had a conversation only yesterday with a really close friend and they had this idea that humans are the custodians of the planet and that we are here to just help along the life cycle and that we shouldn't actually impact it we're just there to nurture and to support so i'm i'm absolutely loving that idea and that really does apply not just with wildlife and flora applies to teams right if you think of yourself as

enabling a team you know that's how i see it so basically do no harm um so we've only got a very short while left so i'm going to kind of speed through this i'm going to ask one question about collaboration um so we know you know this is part of the um fair play alliance summit so you know we know bringing industry together can create wonderful wonderful things sharing best practices um i know that raising good gamers for example are doing some fantastic work as well um bringing industry voices together and looking at kind of how collaborations sharing tools and all sorts of things on this do you guys know of other projects or organizations who are really doing that stuff um and what does good cross industry collaboration really look like i'll start with you again robin um i would actually just say that the fair play alliance is is a perfect example of you know a motivated group of people really trying i think the aiis um megan scavio has been really leading

that community the academy of interactive arts and sciences to do more work uh sponsoring women people of color queer and trans folks and breaking in at the at the executive level so you know inviting them to dice and giving them exposure to business development practices which i think we need to do interventions at the top of the food chain in addition to the bottom and then the third one i'll mention is is the one up fund uh which is run by ed freeze who was the founder of the xbox um he's built a really inclusive and an amazing uh process oriented investment fund that supports uh that supports developers from a variety of walks of life in a way that's really compelling and i think that as we continue to grow the industry and more people make money we'll see funds and sponsorship coming from more diverse people and that's when we'll truly see the way that ashley and her colleagues deserve you know is when people who have made it are also from these groups and sponsoring them to continue to develop pay it forward very much and that is there anything you

want to add to this point what are you saying i'm sure i think you know robin said it so well yes perfect okay so we have three questions from wrapping up so what are the opportunities of building in a metaverse space um i think you know the opportunities are like endless and we at toya i think we buy into dave's vision of creating whole new economies on the platform and we see the platform as a very accessible and constructive place that can create financial opportunities and jobs and even new careers for many young people across a number of fields and i think that you know also being here on the platform in the early days of real world brands and ips coming onto roblox is also an incredible opportunity and responsibility i think it means we can influence the way that brands participate

and create greater you know inclusion and acceptance and and like really align with the core values of the platform like around creativity and accessibility and inclusion and fun so being a part of that like helping big brands build themselves and bringing them in as an opportunity to rewrite the narrative this is how i see it it really is and i'm so pleased anna you use the word fun this has been very weighty topics we talked about all that serious stuff but ultimately we want to create experiences and places that are fun for everybody we want them to have a good time when they're hanging out as well as all of this representation okay we have our last couple of minutes so i am going to just ask this question ashley i would love to come back to you on this if it's okay what advice would you give to the next generation of young game developers for building content um as next generation of game developers your

number one goal should be to accommodate for the next generation of gamers it's perfect i think that you summed it up in one line robin anna just a one line on that do you have thoughts um i really believe that actually bringing your full self to whatever creative activity you do is so important really learning to have the confidence to speak from your experience and and building and building things that reflect that experience is the best way especially with games to give other people an opportunity to identify with you to empathize with you and to experience your perspective wonderful thank you annette i don't think i have anything to add i think i'm just okay i'm going to throw the last question to you then if you had a crystal ball what do you think the next big development in terms of inclusion and representation and how we embrace diversity what do you think is going to be the next big thing um like i think that when it comes that

we would not need to discuss that any longer so no one would know who you are and you can be you can really be what you want to be that's the next step for me next phase yes i'm so looking forward to that and that for me is the perfect wrap-up thank you so much for being on the panel today it's been a fantastic conversation i'm sure everyone's gonna really enjoy it thank you all so much [Music]